Re: [wg-c] new TLDs

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

On 23 December 1999, "Roeland M.J. Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com> wrote:


>From a psychological perspective, that won't fly. There is just too much
>value-add to the mnemonic/semantics angle. Applications developers aren't
>going to give that up and end-users would shun the service if they did,
>particularly if no one else is dropping that service usage.


The mnemonic/semantics angle is currently only of benefit to those who
speak and/or read English, as CNO, and most other non-ccTLDs are all
Engligh-language derived.

To the rest of the non-English-speaking world, they are already
equivalent to random strings, or have quite different meanings from
those intended.

Most of you have a stronger legal and business background than I do,
but I'll be happy to argue memorability and psychological theory for
ages on this, as that happens to be one of my fields of expertise.  We
can go round and round about how memorable a domain name is, how it's
going to be categorized by a typical native speaker, whether it's more
or less unique than other strings, whether it has intrinsic meaning
outside of the content of the pages associated with it, and so on.

I tried to bring an aspect of this up in WG-B: Psychologically, a
famous mark becomes a generic term used for all entities in a category
(e.g., kleenex, xerox, coke, etc.) and no amount of legislation,
arguing, or litigation is going to change that fundamental aspect of
human cognition.  When you start arguing "how it's used", "how it's
remembered", and related areas, you're venturing into cognitive
psychology.  This field has years of research which may or may not 
agree with the various claims people want to make about labels
and how they're remembered and organized in the mind.  

I would strongly advise everyone to inform themselves about these
areas if this is the foundation from which you're going to build
sweeping policy.  Policy can be changed.  Cognitive processes are not
so easily altered.


-- 
Mark C. Langston
mark@bitshift.org
Systems Admin
San Jose, CA