RE: [wg-c] Re: nine principles for domain names

["Winer, Jonathan" <JWiner@alston.com>]

These are very hard questions, and principled people can have different
visions. From my perspective, if gTLDs provide a means for people to
organize behavior in relation to the net, for their purposes, rather than
for the machine's purpose, a gTLD would seem to have some value. As far as
language for people is concerned, for most business, operational and
governmental or administrative purposes, English really is the linqua franca
amongst the more internationalist elements of a large preponderance of the
countries in the world, whatever one's political opinions of how that came
to be  true. I am a poor linguist myself, and was able to get business done
in over 50 countries over the past six years due to the superior ability of
most of my foreign colleagues in English, which many millions of people have
learned out of necessity. There is no universal language, but English comes
as close as anything on this earth, at least for now, and with the net, this
trend does not seem to be decelerating. (Outrageously, in Brussels, the EU
capita, pretty much all business is done in English because it's the only
language that all the EU-types share in common. Ditto Strassburg, for the
Council of Europe, where the US isn't even a member.) Beyond English,
there's the UN approach: issue DNS in Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, and
French as well and you've covered a lot of territory, with a limited number
of unrecognizable suffixes and symbols ending to show up up in places where
people can't appreciate them, or don't use them because they are not primary
on their keyboards. Thus more reasons for this ex-diplomat's support for the
Sheppard approach.    Karl Auerbach 
> Sent:	Monday, February 21, 2000 6:36 PM
> To:	Philip Sheppard
> Cc:	wg-c@dnso.org
> Subject:	Re: [wg-c] Re: nine principles for domain names
> 
> 
> > 1. We do believe that the assumption that all gTLDs will/should stand
> for
> > something is valid. The alternative is to not bother with a gTLD and use
> > only the IP address.
> 
> One of the prime purposes of DNS is to provide a relatively unchanging
> "handle" to reference a host interface (IP address), mail exchanger, H.323
> IP phone number, etc etc.
> 
> As such DNS is a "level of indirection".
> 
> One could dispense with the DNS layer and have things map *directly* to IP
> addresses, IP phone numbers, etc but that would indice massive thrashing
> of those databases because IP addresses do change many orders of magnitude
> more frequently than do the DNS names.
> 
> This layer of indirection is the main virtue of DNS.  The fact that humans
> have (temporarily) been involved in typing in DNS names, which has caused
> all of this debate, is merely an ancillary characteristic of DNS.  And the
> end of that human relationship with DNS is something that will slowly and
> substantially diminish as true directory services become more of a true
> layer rather than the manually-invoked side-lookup that they are today.
> 
> As such, there is absolutely no value in having DNS names "stand for
> something" in a semantic sense.  As far as providing a stable handle is
> concerned "ui56pwz.uym23.q3z" is just as valid as "www.cavebear.com", the
> software does not care.
> 
> And when one says "stand for something" one is saying something about the
> linguistic context of a human user.  And given the billions of people on
> this planet who speak non-European languages, any choice of linguistic
> context is necessarily going to be the wrong choice for a significant part
> of the world's population.
> 
> 		--karl--
> 
> 

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