> I like this idea. (Note that VIXIE.SF.CA.US has moved many times since its
> creation, and though I've always been in the Bay Area I've not lived in San
> Francisco since 1988.)This would seem to indicate that geographical domains are a bad idea and
that domain names should be based on some characteristic that is less
likely to change over time.VIXIE.BIND.HACKER ?
Given the tremendous demand for short, "sexy" domain names, and that we only
have 70,000 companies in .COM out of 25,000,000 mid-to-large-sized businesses
in the United States, we are indeed fast approaching the point where domain
names will no longer map meaningfully to the objects they identify. Something
like .US which is currently for individuals will have an even tougher time
growing to 200,000,000+ individuals. I've been kicking around VIXIE.FAM et al,
on the assumption that the first use of a name under .FAM (family) would be
responsible for setting up the tree for the rest of the folks using that name.
On the other hand, SMITH.FAM would be a pretty huge undertaking and I'm leaning
more toward something that service providers could do as a third-party. I
don't know what that is yet.
I wish that Padlipski had not retired - we collectively need his wisdom. "The
map is not the territory." No hierarchy will map easily to all registrants --
the goal is to find something that will work, no matter how painful it is, and
let the directory services people handle the mapping of real-world object names
like countries and cities and families and companies, into funny-world objects
like host names and URLs and so forth. Assigning hexadecimal strings at random
would be better than what we have now -- in terms of scalability to the next
order of magnitude in network size -- just so long as the strings were unique.
Sort of the "social security number" concept only on a wider scale.
That said, ".HACKER" would probably not be a useful top level domain given that
the majority of DNS registrants will not be computer or network professionals
for very much longer.
So far I'm headed toward "Label.Hash.COM.US" where Label is something
like SUN or IBM or VIX, Hash is a variable sized token generated from Label
and intended to keep the single .COM.US domain from growing into a monster.
"Label.Hash.COM.State.US" is also a possibility, that's up to the USDOMREG.
Closing .COM and moving to this new structure is going to be a huge
undertaking, of course.