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Michael Dillon writes:

How does providing different top level domains for different categories
of organizations "violate the laws of physics", Michael?

It tries to confine objects to a single state whereas physics teaches that
the universe cannot be so neatly sliced and diced.

Of course, I could have simply asked the question that needs to be asked,
namely: why would anyone want a name to include a category anyway?

Your name, Jay Ashworth, gives no clue as to your education, your
training, your profession, your age, your race, your height. Why should an
Internet domain name be any different? The DNS needs to be hierarchical so
that a query can trace a path from the root of the DNS to find the IP
address belonging to a name. But why should the branches in the hierarchy
mean anything in particular in any given human language? Some people would
like to restrict .com to COMMON usage, .org to ORGASMIC providers and .net
to CLEAN content (net is French for clean), but I personally don't give a
damn and prefer a more diverse and chaotic system of naming.

Ahh but you're wrong..

Ashworth is his family identifier. It gives him a possible relationship with
other "Ashworth"s in existance.

Chaotic and diverse naming is fine as long as you have a rather nice way
of indexing it all.

But.. we don't.
(And don't joke about search engines..)

FOr example. Wouldn't it make more logical sense if there existed a domain
'movie.com' with which movies were registered under? Saves stuff like
http://www.titanic-themovie.com/ or whatever it is since Titanic is taken.
And it means that there can be a rather logical choice to start a search of
your favourite movie's official web presence.

What about looking for a car? GOing online shopping? Finding pr0n? (oh wait,
thats one thing search engines are good for..)

With the sheer amount of information on the internet today there really needs
to be a decent distributed indexing system for all of it. DNS could have been
it if it were maintained a little more thoughtfully from the beginning.

My 2c.. (I think its 0.7c in the US..)

Adrian

2

FOr example. Wouldn't it make more logical sense if there existed a domain
'movie.com' with which movies were registered under?

I quite agree that it would make more logical sense. It would also make
more logical sense if all babies were assigned to a profession at birth
and all Internet providers were licensed by the State Bandwidth Demand and
Supply Board. But there is more to life than logic and "sense". Therefore
I prefer a naming system that is diverse and chaotic and I'm confident
that such a system would evolve into something that would be of more use
to more people than a hierarchical taxonomy.

With the sheer amount of information on the internet today there really needs
to be a decent distributed indexing system for all of it. DNS could have been
it if it were maintained a little more thoughtfully from the beginning.

Dream on. DNS is an addressing scheme just like "123 Any St., Anytown,
USA". It does a job that needed to be done, more or less well. If you want
something different then find people who will pay for it and build it. I
suspect you will find that there is little demand and no money available
to build a universal index of everything there is.

3

> FOr example. Wouldn't it make more logical sense if there existed a domain
> 'movie.com' with which movies were registered under?

I quite agree that it would make more logical sense. It would also make
more logical sense if all babies were assigned to a profession at birth
and all Internet providers were licensed by the State Bandwidth Demand and
Supply Board.

Huh? Where'd _that_ come from? I think his suggestion was a passable
one, to try and fit an observed reality into a (for the moment) fixed
taxonomy. .movie would probably be a better solution, but we're not
going there (yet).

                 But there is more to life than logic and "sense". Therefore
I prefer a naming system that is diverse and chaotic and I'm confident
that such a system would evolve into something that would be of more use
to more people than a hierarchical taxonomy.

Might we say "flexible" instead? What, precisely, are you suggesting?

Hierarchicality is almost forced by the architectural design of the
current implementation of DNS; and I got a hot scoop for you: you won't
get a flag day on DNS.

Dream on. DNS is an addressing scheme just like "123 Any St., Anytown,
USA". It does a job that needed to be done, more or less well. If you want
something different then find people who will pay for it and build it. I
suspect you will find that there is little demand and no money available
to build a universal index of everything there is.

It would be you, would it not, who "wants something different"?

You're correct, making DNS into anything except a very coarse index is
infeasible. But I don't see any reason to specifically _avoid_ using
DNS as at least a classification tool so people know what to expect
when they go somewhere.

We're veering far off-topic for NANOG here, quick; let's get back on
topic before everyone flies home. :slight_smile:

Cheers,
-- jra

4

Hierarchicality is almost forced by the architectural design of the
current implementation of DNS; and I got a hot scoop for you: you won't
get a flag day on DNS.

The only hierarchy that is forced by DNS is the hierarchy of delegation of
subdomains and the hierarchy of search paths to resolve a name to an
address. The DNS does not favor any particular categorization scheme. You
can just as easily use www.ca.example.com and www.us.example.com as you
can use www.example.us and www.example.ca.

> Dream on. DNS is an addressing scheme just like "123 Any St., Anytown,
> USA". It does a job that needed to be done, more or less well. If you want
> something different then find people who will pay for it and build it. I
> suspect you will find that there is little demand and no money available
> to build a universal index of everything there is.

It would be you, would it not, who "wants something different"?

No. The naming schemes that people currently apply to the DNS are diverse
and chaotic. I don't want to see that changed by imposing a top-down set
of rules on the DNS and that is what everyone else in this thread has
suggested. It matters not if there was some historical understanding that
was followed by the DNS registry 6 years ago. That's not how things work
now. And so far as I can see the Magaziner white paper has given the green
light to IANA to go ahead and expand the top level namespace in an orderly
fashion. It is unlikely that they will impose any rules on the end-users
of domain names, only on the registry system itself to ensure that things
proceed in an orderly fashion.

You're correct, making DNS into anything except a very coarse index is
infeasible. But I don't see any reason to specifically _avoid_ using
DNS as at least a classification tool so people know what to expect
when they go somewhere.

Here's one reason. Because it is impossible to make DNS into anything but
a very coarse index. I remember seeing a documentary of a scientist in
Florida that was studying alligators. He was using a computer to record
and analyze his data. The video showed him entering data into a DOS
machine running EDLIN and then using GWBASIC to process the data. Other
people will swear that you need ORACLE and Mathematica to do scientific
data analysis and recording. If you have a nail that needs hammering then
every tool looks like a hammer. I took my kids to a birdhouse building
class this spring and there weren't enough hammers to go around so I went
out into the parking lot and got a rock. It did the job and they were
pleased to learn that you can hammer nails without a hammer. But if I were
recommending tools for a birdhouse-building factory, you can be sure I
would not recommend hammers. Thus the fact that DNS *COULD* be used as an
indexing system is irrelevant. The real question is: given that the
Internet would greatly facilitate the use of an indexing system, how could
one best be built? And I think there is a real answer to this question
that could be discovered if enough folks would pull together an IETF
working group that includes some librarians and some protocol designers.

We're veering far off-topic for NANOG here, quick; let's get back on
topic before everyone flies home. :slight_smile:

Nobody but you and I are reading this thread anymore.

5

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Dax Kelson
Internet Connect, Inc.
Salt Lake City, UT