f course there are territorial squabbles over claims to names and
phrases. And of course some people and organizations profit from the
situation. But we don't generally erect a stadium in areas where gang
fights break out; so one really has to ask whether it's a good idea to
restructure gTLD architecture -- supposedly the system that will determine
the future of the net, hence a great deal of human communication -- to
cater to a kind of business dispute that's in no way limited to DNS.
Ultimately, it doesn't really matter which proposed gTLD policy reform
prevails, because the gains will be mostly symbolic, not practical --
except, of course, for the would-be registrars, for whom these new
territories could be quite profitable. At minimum, adding new gTLDs such as
".firm", ".nom", and ".stor" will bring about a few openings -- and, more
to the point, a new round of territorial expansions, complete with
redundant registrations, intellectual-property lawsuits, etc. At maximum, a
flattened domain-name space that allows domains such as "whatever.i.want"
will precipitate a domain-grabbing free-for-all that will make navigating
domains as unpredictable as navigating file structures.
Moreover -- and much worse -- where commercial litigation is now to
domain names, an "open" namespace would invite attacks on the use of terms
anywhere in an address. Put simply: where apple.material.net and
sun.material.net are now invulnerable to litigation, in an open namespace
Apple Computers and Sun Microsystems could easily challenge
"you.are.the.apple.of.my.eye" and "who.loves.the.sun".
Neither proposed reform necessarily serves anything resembling a
common good. But both proposed reforms will provide businesses with more
grist for their intellectual property mills and provide users with the
benefits of, basically, vanity license plates. The net result will be one
more step in the gradual conversion of language -- a common resource by
definition -- into a condominium colonized by businesses driven by dreams
of renting, leasing, and licensing it to "users."
It doesn't, however, follow that the status quo makes sense -- it doesn't.
It's rife with conceptual flaws and plagued by practical issues affecting
almost every aspect of DNS governance -- in particular, who is qualified to
do it, how their operations can be distributed, and how democratized
jurisdictions can be integrated without drifting being absorbed by the
swelling ranks of global bureaucracies. The present administration's
caution in approaching gTLD policy is an instinctive argument made by
people happy to
exploit, however informally, the superabundance of domain-name
registrations.
Without doubt, the main instabilities any moderate gTLD policy reform
introduced would be felt in the administrative institutions' funding
patterns and revenues. More radical reforms involving more registrars would
presumably have more radical consequences -- among them, a need to certify
registrars and DNS records, from which organizations with strong links to
security and intelligence agencies (Network Associates, VeriSign, and SAIC)
will surely benefit.
The current administration insists that a flattened name space would
introduce dangerous instabilities into the operations of the net. But
whether those effect would be more extreme than the cumulative impact of
everyday problems -- wayward backhoes, network instabilities, lazy
"netiquette" enforcement, and human error -- is doubtful.
There is one point on which the status quo and its critics agree:
the assumption that DNS will remain a fundamental navigational interface of
the net. But it need not and will not: already, with organizations (ml.org,
pobox.com), proprietary protocols (Hotline), client and proxy-server
networks (distributed.net), and search-engine portal advances (RealNames,
bounce.to) we're beginning to see the first signs of name-based
navigational systems that complement or circumvent domain names.
And they're doing it in ways that address not the bogeys that appear in the
nightmares of rapacious businessmen but the real problems and possibilities
that many, many more users are beginning to face: maintaining stable email
addresses in unstable access markets, maintaining recognizable zine-like
servers in the ephemeral conditions of dynamically assigned IP subnets,
offering cooperative services under unpredictable load conditions, and, of
course, finding relevant info -- not offering it, from a
business perspective, but finding it from a user's perspective.
Tomorrow: "The net has become a nonsystematic distributed repository
used by more and more technically incompetent users for whom wider
bandwidth is the solution to dysfunctional design and proliferating
competitive formats and standards." Part Five of "A Higher Level of
Abstraction."
Background: Parts One, Two and Three.
Elsewhere: An on-topic update from News.Com: "The chaos expected to ensue as the United States cedes control over the domain name system has been postponed for a week."
Europeans gather in Linz for three days to discuss turning policy into practice. Or practice into policy... or something.
Time Daily files a report on the Talbot/Broder mess over at Salon hours after Salon mourns the death of The Netly News.
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