O O Ø O O O O
Dot-Nipple
Some days, I really hate the Internet.
One of the big problems with this great world-wide-whatever is that we sort of skimped in the namespace area. That is, we developed this wonderful electronic infrastructure capable of withstanding war, backholes, and the latest Microsoft Outlook virus, and then gave the world one tiny little pot to draw names from.
Perhaps I'm oversimplifying. Ignoring all the silliness of the country domains for a minute (www.too.many.dots.calgary.ab.ca), we've actually got three reasonable choices for our home on the IP range:
- There's dot-com, which everyone knows, loves, and wishes they had.
- There's dot-org, which has become a catchall for personal domains, open source projects, weblogs, nonprofit societies, domain squatters, and even the occasional honest-to-god organization.
- There's dot-net, which no-one really has a good use for, but gets used anyway whenever the dot-com and dot-org addresses are already taken. Basically, dot-leftover.
The good news is, now that domains have been into silly territory for at least a couple of years, ICANN—the beloved committee in charge of all things namespace has finally gotten around to allocating a new set of top-level domains. That's right, our namespace woes are about to be alleviated. After almost five years of silliness, we have the chance to make some sense out of the Internet namespace mess. The answer to all of our woes is:
dot-museum.
(Well honestly - what did you expect would happen when you left the Internet namespace in the hands of a committee? I've written on committees before, and that was just a shareholder agreement. Sicking one loose on the Internet infrastructure is just plain reckless.)
In fact, dot-museum is just one cornerstone of a seven part plan. The rest of it reads something like:
dot-aero, dot-coop, dot-name, dot-pro, dot-biz, and dot-info
Maybe I have a different view of the Internet from where I'm sitting, but I'm pretty sure it isn't the museums and co-ops that are filling up the Internet namespace. As I see it, today's clogged dot-com namespace is full of two things: Corporations, and Porn.
Since ICANN is clearly incapable of accepting this fact, I've decided to create a new namespace committee.
This will be a committee of one.
I'm going to call it: THEYCANNT.
The THEYCANNT Proposal
The mission of THEYCANNT is to design an Internet infrastructure that actually caters to the people who use it. As such, we propose to scrap the seven new TLDs and start again. Sure, dot-info wasn't a bad idea, but the rest of them are so awful, we've decided to erase all memory of the experience. In lieu, we offer you the following eight domains:
Let's start with the corporations. We at THEYCANNT have come up with the following, admittedly radical proposal:
dot-inc, dot-ltd, dot-llc, and dot-gmbh.
We realize it's uncool to have your URL in your company name now, but we think coca-cola.ltd, warner-brothers.inc, and siemens.gmbh will be able to pull it off.
As for the porn, let's take a wild stab:
dot-xxx
Be honest here. People want to find porn. Porn sites want to be found. Giving them a TLD to play with is not only obvious, it's good for everyone. It's even good for the school systems. (Hint: filter by TLD.)
Is that it? Not quite. There are a few types of content that probably deserve a TLD as well:
dot-promo
We don't know about you, but we are sick of seeing movie promo sites with an estimated lifespan of six weeks polluting out namespace. Do you still visit batmanforever.com regularly? Did you ever? Case in point.
dot-nipple
Actually, this one is completely ridiculous. Still, we at THEYCANNT would hazard to wager that if we went live with it, the dot-nipple namespace would be far more populated than the internet-saving dot-museum.
And finally, the most radical one of them all:
dot-local
This isn't really intended to be a TLD at all. It's just a piece of your network configuration that lets you map to any extension whatsoever. Live in Calgary? Set
.local = .calgary.ab.ca
Now when I visit www.gov.local, I'll get something useful. Mom and Pop businesses can now buy a domain name that doesn't pollute the global namespace, without fear of people mistyping their URL. Honestly, does Lakeview Bakery really intend to sell muffins to somebody in New Jersey? If I want to know if I can buy a loaf of rice bread at 9:30pm on a Thursday, however, organicbaking.local is the site for me.
So thanks ICANN, for your Internet-saving proposal. I think I'm going to stick with my committee of one, however. In the meantime, I have a dot-nipple domain to purchase.
Kjell Wooding
Tuesday, October 2, 2001
PD DXV