Technology

The Domain Renaissance

Written by Trick on June 27, 2008 10:21 am EST

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

In the beginning, there were .com, .net, .org, .gov and .edu. And then we went fully global and created country TLDs. So now there’s .us, .uk, .jp, .cn, .de and more. Well, that world is about to explode.

Imagine going to McDonalds and your local fast food eatery has a website: www.8thand10th.nyc.ny.mcdonalds

Or maybe you start shopping at Amazon and find yourself at http://www.books.amazon/fiction/stephenking/

The idea is right, but we should have had this setup from the beginning. Now, unless the brand is known, the domain is going to be questioned. There will be an extremely high level of mistrust for these domains. Internet lay-people know to trust the main .com’s, the idea of .us or .info never really took off because they weren’t recognizable.

Then we have the issue of non-Roman characters. Still. Ever since the Internet hit Asia they’ve struggled to adapt to the completely alien alphabets. In Japan it’s become a standard, instead of directing people to a domain, they send them to a popular search site and tell you the keyword to get directed to their site. But now more than ever for the global value of the Internet, there needs to be a system to handle these other alphabets for TLDs.

My third point of contention with this supposed change is the pricing. They’re pricing them between $50,000 and $100,000 to limit the owners to larger corporate entities but I hate to bread it to ICANN, spammers got tons of money and it’s going to be a field day for them. They’re going to snatch up seemingly innocuous domain suffixes in an effort to find one more way to trap unsuspecting users. It’s going to make the Internet just that much more dangeous.

And the last point is wondering how they’re going to ensure security for the Internet’s DNS. When you buy this domain suffix you become a registrar and thus get access to update the DNS server. Now, presumably some of the brightest minds in the world will come together to update and modify these systems but I still think it is a major security hole and might be cause for major concern.

Overall, I’ve got major reservations if this change to the system goes through. It’s such a drastic change that it runs many risks, but it is also right in line with the goal of the Internet to open it up as much as possible, so long as it can maintain stability. The whole of Internet should not be Twitter-like in stability.

Trackback URL for this post: http://www.gimmiethescoop.com/the-domain-renaissance/trackback