Here’s a (cough) brilliant (cough) idea: culturally-based top-level domain names (TLDs) for the Internet.
If approved, .LAT will become one of the first TLDs based on an ethnic group instead of being limited by country. The first, according to Keenan, was .CAT for Catalonians (for those not familiar, Catalonia is an autonomous community within Spain). With a new TLD approval process coming in 2008, .LAT and .CAT could be just the beginning of a bigger wave of domains focused around culture and lifestyle. We may one day see TLDs like .GLBT or .BIKE for the gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans and cycling communities, for example. The question is: who plans to beat me to applying for .NERD?
Here’s my concern. A top-level domain is technically a container, an element of the domain name system (DNS) that segregates one thing from another. When the proposal for the .xxx domain name appeared from the conservative politicians it was clearly aimed at making censorship easier by putting all “adult content” inside a giant kennel, one that is easily filtered and blocked. The pornography industry ultimately (and rightly, in my opinion) fought back against this idea and prevented themselves from being so easily cornered—because they had the money.
Accepting a culturally-based domain name feels like putting a giant red bull’s eye symbol on your back. Not that there can’t be benefits to organizing as a visible community, because you know I think there are. I just don’t think questions of content should be encoded into the world’s telecommunications infrastructure as what amounts to big electric fences.
From an (ignorant) user’s perspective, I don’t think more top-level domain names are a good thing either. They add confusion to a situation that already has too much of it. A good example is the absurd idea of having top-level domain names for ultra-local geographic areas, such as the proposed .nyc TLD for New York City.
Compare the notion of a web site at the address info.nyc versus an identical web site at the address nyc.info. I mean, come on, the latter even sounds logical when you say it, and it leaves the playing field open for other cities perhaps not as high-profile as New York City to provide their own information web sites. That way, it also becomes trivial to intuit the locations of all sorts of information web sites about cities: tel-aviv.info, tokyo.info, and the like.
Furthermore, stuffing more and more crap into top-level domain names creates a situation where important context is lost. Consider, for instance, our government-sponsored municipal information web site example. Compare nyc.info versus another possibility, say info.nyc.ny.state.gov. They both can lead to the same information, but with the latter (and longer) address, you know exactly where you are: the information web site of the city of New York in the state of New York run by the (American) federal government. NYC.info could just redirect, or the sites could be mirrors of each other. The point is, with the latter scheme, you can drill further still, envisioning: health.info.nyc.ny.state.gov, and so on and so forth.
But what do you think? Will a .glbt domain become a rallying point or a ghetto? What about .malesub, or maybe .femdom?
By the way, for those interested, there are actually alternative root DNS servers (effectively creating other Internets) that you can configure your computer to interact with, if you are becoming as fed up with the folks at ICANN as I am.
by Tom Allen
26 Nov 2007 at 19:46
And just the other day I was telling the Edgelette about back in the old days, when those of the geekier persuasions used to create their own domain name, making sure that they picked a .net in order to prove how geeky they were.
Holy crap. Some of my old, forgotten web pages still seem to be up. Geez, doesn’t anybody ever clean up the friggin’ interwebz around here? Do we have to wait until April 1st for the bandwidth sweepers?
May, as somebody who once paid for vanity plates for his car and his motorcycle, I kind of like the idea of a bunch of TLDs. It’s an economic thing; if people want to pay for them, then let them have it. I do agree, though, that too many could become confusing… but that’s because most people only know “dot com”. A few more people recognize that .gov or .edu are valid options when searching for something, and a few more might remember to use .org.
I do predict that at some point, given enough TLDs, somebody will come up with an extended tirnyurl tool in order to sniff out what you really want.
by maymay
26 Nov 2007 at 22:29
Heh, I remember bits of those old days, Tom. I also understand the argument that more TLDs equals a greater namespace and thus more options, economically and otherwise. Hell, the only reason I have a
.netaddress because back in 1995 when I was registering my own domain name, maymay.com was a porn site showcasing barely-legal Chinese girls (now some squatter’s got it) and maymay.org was a personal home page with horribly illegible text and animated GIFs in true GeoCities style (now it’s a Yahoo! Blog—some things never change). Of course now I like the implication and think it’s cool. Still, I don’t think a domain name is comparable to a vanity plate on a car—until we have so many TLDs that it will be, which is my problem with the whole thing.As for tiny URL services, I’ve never been a fan of them for the simple reason that, in any properly designed system, their length doesn’t matter. The fact that URLs are so visible to users today is already a bad sign. Furthermore, there’s also this recent debate.
Also, I still see hits for my old RPG pages I created back in the late nineties with a bunch of friends, and I don’t even have the subscription service those are hosted on anymore. I’m fond of telling this anecdote: back in the USENET golden days, some servers and many client applications embedded a warning message that would display itself the first time you submitted a post that said something along the lines of, “What you have to say is about to be copied to hundreds upon hundreds of computers across the world and it will remain visible in the public domain for all eternity. Are you sure you’re satisfied with how you’ve expressed yourself?”
by Curvaceous Dee
27 Nov 2007 at 13:08
Well, here in New Zealand we now have a .geek.nz subdomain, which has become quite popular quite quickly. I like the concept of having cultural domains as opposed to geographical, though – especially if people have the choice to use or not.
xx Dee
by Richard
02 Dec 2007 at 19:37
My own experience with the internet predates the web. I was a somethingorother in Fidonet, RIME and others.
These alternative domain name servers remind me of the alternative press of years ago. Essentially people talking to themselves and the already converted. Most of their sales were to people who read the sex ads (I also helped run an early gay newspaper when such were oddities).
I like talking to like-minded folks. But I don’t want to limit myself to people who agree with me.
So I’ll stick to .com and .org.
by Sunshine Love
29 Mar 2011 at 15:44
It’s funny how quickly our need to identify with an in-group, any in-group, can make us jump on these splinterings as an automatic good thing, ie: “yes! there’s a place that’s made just for us”. But we never see the ghetto, how the separation could be a bad thing. I hadn’t really thought of this as a larger, recurring problem until your Fetlife post linked it in with the .xxx debate and the trans ghetto in SF.
This is going to leave me pondering for days. Where does the value in forming groups based upon identity end and the harm caused by isolationism begin? We want to be with people like us, yet we want to be accepted by the society at large. Where exactly is the happy place?