I read today on BBC News website that The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is considering introducing many many more top-level-domains (TLDs) for the internet addressing system to go alongside the existing ones such as .com, .org, .net etc...
I don't understand the rationale for that. We already have the problem where an organisation establishing a new domain has to go and purchase the .net, .org (and various other TLDs) in order to ensure that those addresses are not hi-jacked by phishers or cybersquatters, why do we need to make the problem worse?
Better would be to remove the constraints put in place by ICANN and do away with a finite list of TLDs completely thus allowing organisations to use their organisation name as their TLD. I've never really understood the advantage of prepending/appending "www." and ".com" onto nearly every single website that we visit; I'd much prefer it if the web followed the naming conventions employed by the newsgroup protocol NNTP which "walks" the hierarchy of all NNTP content the further along the address you go (e.g. nntp://microsoft.public.sqlserver.ssis). That's not the case with HTTP addresses today which has a number of problems such as:
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URIs are only hierarchical after the first single "/"
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contain needless detritus like "www"
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use different seperators depending on where you are in the URI (i.e. "." or "/").
As a suggestion, wouldn't the following URIs make more sense, be more concise and be inherently more consistent than those used today (which are shown in brackets):
I certainly think they would. I admit that I've got my rose-tinted-specs on here because I don't know enough about the Domain Name System (DNS) nor about URI addressibility to know if this is or ever has been technically feasible but I would hope that it is. I certainly don't believe that the current system of addressibility on the web is optimal. Interestingly in the article linked to above it is also stated:
In June 2008 Icann announced proposal to allow an unlimited number of new gTLDs, citing greater competition and lower costs as the benefits of a more open system
Good, that's exactly what I'm talking about here although I see the benefits as being greater simplicity and consistency, not lower costs and greater competition (those justifications from ICANN are not explained). Extending the finite list of current TLDs though feels like a step in completely the wrong direction; that list should be getting shortened, not lengthened. In other words, ICANN have (bafflingly) made two proposals in the last six months that are contradictory to each other; one in June saying they're going to get rid of the list of TLDs and now another saying thay're actually going to extend that list.
I'm wading into what is, for me, unknown territory but most of this stuff just seems like basic common sense. What say you?
-Jamie
P.S. I had similar complaints almost 4 years ago to the day when I wrote New TLDs on the horizon.