I kind of get the feeling this proposal is as well thought out as when people wanted to get rid of hierarchical file systems in the early 00s.
The top level domains provide some organization behind domains. it also lends some authority to the system as a whole. would it even be posible to have dnssec without a tld to be signed? how would you know who to ask for information about the domain at all?
It'd be like telling all the national registrars they didn't matter anymore. especially if there's a new nation and they can't have a domain because squatters have taken over all two letter domains.
I'm sure there are a lot of other reasons why this is a bad idea, but i'm not versed enough in dns to come up with more specifics.
I feel like a jerk being this negative. but please don't start throwing out ideas for major changes in such vital infrastructure without a solid background working with it. you could get people started on some crusade that does more irreparable damage than good
Say you have a company FOO and you register foo.com. Nothing stops people in other people from registering foo.de, foo.fr, foo.tv, foo.biz, foo.info and so on, so you have to control all of these domains to protect you from domain squatters.
My proposal is to to get rid of every TLD except for .com (or something shorter) for all "normal" sites with little regulation and keep .mil, .gov, .edu and national TLDs under governmental authority.
For example, it makes the internet less safe - people remember just the company name foo, foo.x is the real site, somebody enters foo.y and lands on a scam site
and this is a problem why? i can see taking issue with allowing unicode tlds. where some russian characters are almost identical to a latin based char-set for instance, but if you can't tell the difference between bankofamerica.com and bankofamerica.cn, you probably also fall for a lot of other scams offline too.
Would you recommend a non-internet-savvy user from china to rather go to paypal.cn or to paypal.com/cn ?
What would a non-savvy user normally do?
In this case paypal.cn redirects to paypal.com/cn, but would you have known?
Another example: Python.com redirected to a hardcore porn site for years. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I think both sites and their respective audiences would have been better off if there wasn't .com, .net and .org
I think there isn't going to be a system where the domain name points to the site that is more "legit" or "relevant", that is the job of search engines. Laypersons already use google instead of dns and enter "facebook" or "facebook.com" because they 1) don't have to remember the TLD and 2) get to facebook even when they made a typo.
So a domain name should probably still belong to whomever registered it first. I'm not a DNS wizard but using whois I figure python.com was registered one year before python.org, which would have become python-lang.com or something more descriptive if there weren't these other suffixes.
Except python.org is so much better than python-lang.com that isn't even funny.
Case in point ... I searched for "ruby language" dozens of times before learning "ruby-lang.org". And the ".org" suffix was the easy part because my brain associates those domains with non-profit stuff.
I also find TLDs to be useful for figuring out the target of a website. E.g. ".co.uk" / ".de" / ".eu" are usually companies with headquarters in the European Union.
note my point about squatters was specifically that allowing random tlds to registered, by anyone who wanted to at all, would prevent new national tlds.
I think the problem is that it would break existing network infrastructure.
You need a last component to the domain name to signify that the ip you want to resolve is outside of the local network. Imagine what would happen if somebody would register "localhost" or "main-server"
You got a pretty much totalitarian world view. Don't you?
In most countries it's perfectly legal to have 2 (or more) businesses use the same name - provided they don't compete in the same field. In German a Microsoft that deals in software and a Microsoft that produces ice cream can co-exist.
So why shouldn't be it legal for someone in Germany to call his company FOO too? Just because you registered your name in Idaho doesn't mean that a guy in Japan is forbidden to use that name.
Sure, we can allow that, but it makes the internet more confusing and less safe. When anyone can register microsoft.x, there is the legitimate use case for the ice-cream manufacturer microsoft, but more likely it will be a scammer or a phisher or something like that.
If we give up these nationalized namespaces (which aren't really enforced anyway, see .tv and and .ly etc) then we have one canoncial name for normal web sites, and microsoft ice cream could be found at microsofticecream.com
By the way, I don't mean "allow" in a legal sense. Everybody can run their own DNS system and be happy with it, I use the word in a technical sense. Everybody can call his company how he prefers, this is about DNS.
> Sure, we can allow that, but it makes the internet more confusing and less safe. When anyone can register microsoft.x, there is the legitimate use case for the ice-cream manufacturer microsoft, but more likely it will be a scammer or a phisher or something like that.
So we should give up our freedom because there are bad guys abusing that freedom?
