[wg-c] Cartesian rationalism v. Internet evolution

[Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>]

Keith Gymer wrote:

> It's a general issue of organising the namespace in an intelligent
> and logical
> fashion in the greater interest of ALL internet users, consumers,
> businesses
> and the rest, not just for the private profit of a few would-be
> registry
> operators.
>
> At national level I would see ccTLD operators taking a pro-active
> view and
> getting a broad based consultative committee together themselves of
> users,
> business, YP etc

Don't we have direct experience with this kind of proposal?

One of them was Jon Postel's completely unsuccessful attempt to turn
dot US into a geographic taxonomy. This is one of the  main
contributors to the dominance of NSI in US registrations. Give
consumers of domain names a choice between a name space that puts
*themselves* in control, and a rigid category scheme imposed on them
from above, and they flood into the former. Users of domain names are
impatient with more than two or three levels of hierarchy.

The other spectacular failure along these lines was the SLD taxonomy
in dot FR. How bad was it? Well, to give you an indication, there were
in mid-1999 more registrations under .NU than under .FR, despite the
fact that Nuie has about 200 people in it, and there were more French
entities registering under dot com than under .FR. I understand that
the French have seen the light, have abandoned this folly, and are now
marketing FR as an entirely unrestricted TLD.

Folks, there's just no way around it: people want domain names to be
conveniently short and semantically meaningful addresses, the catchier
the better. That's ALL they want. There is no evidence that they want,
or need, a classificatory structure to the name space. Classification
schemes of something as heterogeneous and rapidly changing as Internet
content simply should not be hardwired into the name space.

Of course, if some TLD administrators want to try to create a SLD
structure, more power to them--as long as the domain name users in the
country have the choice to ignore it if they don't like it.