Rome's burning. Let's fiddle.A complete overhaul of the way people navigate the internet could begin following a crucial vote in Paris.
The net's regulator Icann will vote to decide if the strict rules on so-called top level domain names, such as .com or .uk, can be relaxed.
Don't you just love technology reporting?
A complete overhaul of the way people navigate the internet?
Which people? Among end users, who cares about domain names anymore? Nobody I know.
Every time I watch a user looking for a web page, he or she starts with search. In fact, people generally start with a Google search. And then they finish searching and do what they wanted to do in the first place. They consume content.
I now rarely see anyone actually type a URL into a browser address box. If they do type a URL at all, people may often be seen typing it into a Google search box anyway.
Just as we didn't need a specific top level domain to tell us that a site was about, for example, dot info, we don't need a top level domain to tell us that a site is about dot anything else.
Content is all that is needed to establish that.
If there is really to be a free-for-all on TLDs, then there will just be endless new land rushes - a term favoured by the domain name industry itself to describe the inevitable panic, which invariably follows the launch of any new TLD, by parties wishing to protect their own brands and other intellectual property from those who would abuse them.
"Like the United States in the 19th Century, we are in the process of opening up new real estate, new land, and people will go out and claim parts of that land and use it for various reasons they have.
"It's a massive increase in the geography of the real estate of the internet."
Massive, yes. But where land rushes are limited in the physical world by the availability of land itself, which is a finite quantity, these virtual land rushes are boundless.
Those of us with brands or reputations to protect and who believe that this can be achieved through control of domain names will just keep on paying through the nose for every new .TLD, just in case.
There is no end. We'll just have to keep on forking over cash to domain registrars for ever. And for what? Where's the value here?
There is none - unless you happen to own shares in a domain registrar.
There is one voice of reason in that Beeb article:
"It will be expensive and pointless," he [Geoff Wicks, chief executive of NBT] said. "It will be a big problem for companies as they will have to buy up lots of domains to cover themselves."
But, while the domain name industry fiddles with the domain name system, the Internet itself is burning. The IPv4 address pool will inevitably become exhausted at some point within the next two years or so.
Do yourself a favour. If you have to decide between handing over yet more cash for domain names you don't need, or spending it on preparing your dual IPv4 / IPv6 stack, go with IPv6.
That is the real Internet land rush. And it hasn't started yet.
See also: What's in a (domain) name?
1. Andre Guirard27/06/2008 21:59:26
Homepage: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/bpmpblog.nsf
Icann has to approve this now, unfortunately, because they're doing it on a "cost recovery" basis. The only way they'll recover the costs of researching whether they should do this, is by doing it.
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