A Dutch technology company has breathed life into a project to rid the Internet of suffixes such as .com, and instead offer single names which can be countries, company names or fantasy words. Such a system, which enables countries, individuals and firms to have a Web address consisting of a single name, offers flexibility and is language and character independent. “The plan is to offer names in any character set,” said Erik Seeboldt, managing director of Amsterdam-based UnifiedRoot.
Living in Canada I on occasion like searching for items using .ca to find more local items, and .com for a wider search. This so called new approach infact limits me a bit more in choice if everyone used it.
Worse, any name in any font? Did we not just see fake websites that fool people by using difirent fonts for individual letters so the URL looks the same while pointing elsewhere?
First, I think the cryptic tlds that we have now are a good thing because they tell people right away that they’re looking at a url. Just like the @ tells people what they see is an email address. If you get rid of the tlds, then it suddenly gets much harder to place everything. For instance, I’m currently looking at a program from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and along the bottom of the pages it says ‘www.rpo.co.uk’. If that said something plain like ‘rpo’ I’d think it was stupid and wouldn’t have any idea what to do with it.
Secondly, I don’t know all the details, but it’s scary to think that they can just sort of hijack the system that ICANN has set up and start allowing people to use these domains without anybody else’s permission. Although I’d prefer if ICANN was more internationally controlled, I like the fact that it’s a sort of merit based dictatorship (kinda like Plato’s philosopher-kings). If anybody can suddenly do whatever, then I think we’re in for a rough ride.
This is what investors would call a “boil the ocean” scheme, in which everyone needs to switch to the newfangled method at once in order for the newfangled method supplier to survive. Here sites cannot advertise their new rootless name since most people can’t access it. They will have to keep resolving in the current TLDs, well, forever. Most search bars will already resolve say “osnews” to “osnews.com” if that’s what you type in the address bar. In summary there is no compelling value to switch and still everybody needs to switch that once. I’ve seen that kind of model before…
Best regards,
Emmanuel
If it’s not broken, break it, right?
So sick of dumb “innovations” like this.
Actually, as any engineer knows:
If it ain’t broken, it doesn’t have enough features yet.
Read this:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/66689
Well, it is german, but perhaps babelfish does a good translation.
Every once in a time someone comes and acclaims to have just invented the www. Ridiciously.
Why in god’s name do they want to offer names in every character set? There’s only one character set they need to support. Or does he just use character set in an ambiguous manner and he means every “script” (= alphabet)?
This, as many others, are direct consequences of unsustainable position to let one country to have a direct control over Internet basic structures.
Expect more and more companies from EU and other zones to reject to be forced to adapt their business chances and rules to the will of a single country. If politics is not able to drive changes, business world will do that for sure.
I would have preferred to find a deal to reform the Internet but since this has not been possible… as many others I will be going to fund any credible initiative to force a change.
“Most search bars will already resolve say “osnews” to “osnews.com” if that’s what you type in the address bar.”
Is it..? And why..? It is a simple setting that can be changed in a second, which would be done if such a system was adopted.
Anyway, people don’t even use the available options. Since the times you could obtain a *.name address, I have got one, but never got to know even a single person who’s got one as well. Likewise, I don’t see any other of the newer domains such as *.biz, *.law.pro, etc.
I just tried hp, dell amd sony *.biz — none of them are active. This propbably means that the fancy new system won’t be noticed and rather than die, never come alife due to a lack of interest. Even where it would make sense to have a *.name domain in order to be safe from naughty companies or other individuals suing you for the usage of your own name in a domain like *com people don’t show interest.
I a only aware of one *.us domain I ever came across. However, the owner sugegst to use the same domain, only ending in *com alternatively because the *us version doens’t work reliably
The same thing happened to personalized phone numbers – I got one that goes by my name, but who else does..? I don’t know anybody.
Leave the internet alone.
The longer the Internet stays under US Department of Commerce control, the better.
Otherwise it’s going to turn into a FRAGMENTED JOKE, just like the EU.
No, they aren’t trying to get rid of .com
Great way to sensationalize the story, though.
Goodbye then.
I can understand why somebody would “disapprove” of the U.S. dominance over the internet. However, putting a system like this is poor decision making….
ICANN manages the internet in a controlled and stable manor, to change this by adding additional TLDs will only damage the internet in a whole, and lead to more confusion when people try to access websites that they can’t reach.
The article mentioned that an airport had bought the service. If I was checking flight times, I want to be able to reach it whenever, wherever, not dependent on whether my current ISP has an agreement with the TLD provider.
ICANN, may be U.S. controlled, but atleast everone can reach their DNS servers. I think the annonymous poster got it right, leave it alone or else it will become fragmented.
I do not see where is the problem, DNS is itself an alternative and improvement over IP adresses. Using another layer on top of DNS or even in parallel will not be a problem as far as it is just IP translations. ICANN is a de facto “standard”, wich means that it has been universally adopted by the MARKET, so as long as EVERY company does not threaten to be monopolistic/unlawful, let the MARKET decide, these are the rules of the game as promoted by the US everywhere. In another hand, US diplomacy have not been brillian in defending the -good- mono-US management of ICANN. Using just authority instead of explaining the technical/financial issues is at least arrogant=stupid.
Did they think about it twice before publishing this issue?
http://www.zaandam.nl is ok, but
http://www.českéřeky.cz ???
Can you read the second link?
If so, ok then, but how many other people can?
Can you imagine for instance rumanian, greek or chinese in urls?
I think such national companies would reserve two names, in a worldwide plain latin1 alphabet and in their national alphabet too.
What is easier? For me as a czech person it is PRACTICAL to use just simple latin1 alphabet.
That’s it.
If my company is oriented on local market, users will find easier and more natural to type пичка.цом then picka.com, which could be easy to missinterpret
Besides, I’d rather send 30€ in Iran than 15 bucks in … that disgusting country.
“Besides, I’d rather send 30€ in Iran than 15 bucks in … that disgusting country.”
You must not be female…they have it good there. What a wonderful place to vacation, also.
I think this has more of a chance of working if a country dictated that all ISP’s in their country use something like this. In this case, all internet users in this country would “benefit” from using this scheme at the same time.
This scheme shows the flexibility of the DNS system. Basically, create you own root servers which provide new domains, and at the same time, these new DNS servers are pointed to the official ICANN root servers for all other domains.
The problem with this is that you have to get a widespread adoption of the new root servers…basically, all other DNS servers (like at an ISP) need to use these as their root servers and not the ICANN ones. Then the new domains will work properly.
However, this scheme overall seems to be one for profit and not necessarily for any other purpose. I personally don’t think it’s a good idea as it will cause more problems (and loss of money by those that use the service) than it will solve, but, hey, if you think it will solve some type of problem for you, go ahead and give it a shot. I much prefer the system that we have today as it has stood the test of time. Political issues aside, it does work. The politics will be solved over time with the current “issues” people may have with how ICANN is currently doing things.
If implemented by my ISP, it would suddenly break addressbar searching in Firefox.
ASCII is a lowest common denominator that ANY keyboard on ANY computer can type and can be read in ANY font. Ditching that would make it easier for a country to close itself off from the rest of the internet by choosing a name in a native script rather than ASCII. For example, more people probably know Japanese (or can grok Babelfished stuff) than have a keyboard that can TYPE japanese. To use a non-ASCII domain name would effectively block those people from reading websites in Japanese.
i don’t have a Japanese keyboard, but i can type the characters with the Japanese input method enabled. It’s just as easy as writing it phonetically with the letters you see me using right now.
Frankly, i think this idea is good, but there needs to be more than a single company’s interest going on here. i’m sick of typing the “www” so much that i skip it as often as possible (and this works with lots of sites). i’m also sick of typing .com or .org etc. There needs to be a smarter system that does not rely on command line thinking (having to know the name before you can go to the site). This is why Google is the first stop for so many people. There are many cases where a sensible URL guess just isn’t right. So people go to Google. Wouldn’t it be easier to have a humane and linguistically open directory based on non-technical labels? You don’t dial in a radio frequency when you choose which television channels to watch, do you? (not that TV is a great example of the way things should be)