Re: [wg-c] breaking up (names) is hard to do

["Mark C. Langston" <skritch@home.com>]

On 23 August 1999, Mikki Barry <ooblick@netpolicy.com> wrote:
>
>This is definitely a problem, as it is a problem for those whose names are
>reverse hijacked.  I don't personally have a technical proposal, but as a
>policy matter, perhaps further encouraging the use of search engines would
>be helpful.  I would also advocate a more logical choice of gTLD depending
>on the business.  .air for airlines, .auto for car companies, .per for
>personal,  .org for non commercial (which would be possible if there were
>enough other gTLDs that commercial entities didn't feel they had to be in
>..org if their .com had a previous user) or whatever works best would be
>very helpful to consumers and non commercial web, email, ftp, etc. seekers.

What we have here is two related problems:

1)  We have companies still operating at business-time, instead of net-time.
The net is a fluid and dynamic entity, and cannot be expected to be as
rigid as, e.g., a phone book.  That a company invests thousands of dollars
into advertising a domain name is more a problem with the way businesses
view domain names than it is a problem with the DN system itself.  A
domain name should be viewed as more of a phone numer.  View it as a
toll-free vanity number, if you prefer.  But it's a means to an end, not
the end in and of itself.  The businesses will have to adapt somewhat.

2)  The net currently has no effective means of intercepting a request
to a particular domain name and performing a redirect on a widescale
basis.  These days, if you change domain names and you had a web presence
at that domain name, you have to either deal with the fact that the old
domain name's going to give 404s, or you have to come up with some way
of providing a redirect to your new site.

Perhaps what is needed is something akin to what the phone system now
has:  A period of time (30-90 days, perhaps) during which a redirect is
performed from the old to the new domain.  During this period, no one
may own the domain name.  After this period, the domain is put back into
the pool.  The problems here would be largely management of the
namespace.  This could (I think) be implemented using current methods.
It's really jsut a question of policy and management.

-- 
Mark C. Langston	LATEST: ICANN refuses	Let your voice be heard:
mark@bitshift.org  to consider application for       http://www.idno.org
Systems Admin    Constituency status from organized http://www.icann.org
San Jose, CA      individual domain name owners      http://www.dnso.org