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

[John Charles Broomfield <jbroom@manta.outremer.com>]

> 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

Can you say EMAIL? Think of "USER@AOL.COM" and tell me how to solve that for
14 million (?) email addresses. Think prodigy. Think compuserve. Think any
ISP in the world. Look at your business card and tell me if you wouldn't
mind having to scrap all the letterhead, business cards, advertising you had
done with that address. Not to mention of course all the people who
currently have your business card and find that they can't reach you.
If you say it's like when telephone numbers change, well in a way when an
area code changes, you get an automated message saying "The new area code is
XXX", but if you've had to ABANDON your old domain name because of a dispute
with the TLD maintainer, you're NOT going to get that help from them (or you
wouldn't be wanting to run away from them ANYWAY).

Yours, John Broomfield.