[wg-c] Re: IAB comment

[Karl Auerbach <karl@CaveBear.com>]

> ... the IAB is trying to tell us that it is a *bad public policy* to
> for there to be more than one root in the public DNS system, because
> it would lead to "a very strong possibility that users of different
> ISPs who click on the same link on a web page could end up at
> different destinations, against the will of the web page designers."

"against the will of the web page designers" - that is indeed an
interesting phrase.

I strongly disagree that "web page designers" have the power to force me
to read what they put on their pages.

For example, many web page designers put references to advertising
material from doubleclick.com into their web pages.

At CaveBear, such references are intercepted and turned into one pixel
transparent images.  Thus I don't see the advertisements and don't have to
fill the network with the massive number of bits such advertisements
typically require.

Moreover, with new e-commerce profiling capabilities, it is getting common
for there to be devices, typically called "caches" or "directors" that
intercept either DNS or HTTP queries and evaluate them based on a "cookie"
or an accumulated profile of the source address or source user.  Then the
queries are translated by various methods, usually driven by an intent to
sell some product or service, into some different for each distinct
quierier.

And then there is filtering, "net nanny" software.  Such software, like my
doubleclick filters, makes places parts of the net off limits, so that
when a user clicks on a web link, that link doesn't go anywhere at all.

That, it seems to me, also violates the concern expressed by the IAB that
web links might not go where expected.

So, overall, it's already common practice for a URL to show different
things to different people.

And if the IAB were truely concerned that a link always end up at the same
destination, it ought to issue a militant statement against the re-cycling
of URL's or of e-mail addresses and against the removal of any content
once it is posted.

How many times have you said to a friend "Look at this article in the
newspaper, here's the URL" only to get back a response from your friend
that says "They changed it, it now points to a different article."?

By-the-way, this starts to reach into the distinction between URI/URNs
(stable *names* of bodies of information) and URLs (pointers to where a
particular instance of such a such body of information is, hopefully,
located.).

As I've mentioned many times, competitive roots will be driven by
competitive forces to tend to strive to be consistent with one another and
not be sources of user discontent.  No such force towards consistency is
found in web directors or net nannys.

Given all the myriad ways that the web (and increasingly other services on
the net) are being turned into different things for different people it
does seem odd for the IAB to condemn what is probably the least perturbing
form - competetive roots - while remaining silent on those other forms.

		--karl--