A bunch of years ago I was involved in ETSI and ITU-T discussions about allocating an E.164 prefix to VoIP (this was before ENUM, obviously). A couple of European countries that had recently privatized their PTTs and a bunch of African countries were very opposed to it, largely because phone numbers are property and have value. Personally, the extent to which that value tends to lead to misbehavior (domain name squatting, for example) is pretty much the extent to which I support undermining that value.

Unfortunately economics sez that proliferating TLDs will tend to lower the cost of registering in each of them and the whole thing might well end up being a wash.

As well as categories (.com, .edu) of course, domains can be countries: .uk, .de, .fr etc
These are two letter based on ISO country codes

Of these Tuvalu apparently has a revenue stream from .tv

The amusing anomaly is .cat for Catalunya

1) It is a country code, but three letters not ISO two letters

2) It is a country code for a place that is not a country.

Or rather, where inhabitantswould like to be a recognised country, but currently are not.

Or even more convolutedly, shows up anomalies of “country” as a description.

After all, ir Catalunya gets recognition by ICANN then why not Scotland, Corsica, any-number-of-disputed places in Balkans & Central Asia etc

Even more intriguing, within Spain, Basque contry has more autonomy than Catalunya, but not in this respect :)

I have no idea quite how they managed to persuade ICANN to agree they are a country…

There are good technical reasons for using domain names rather than relying on search + IP addresses (and remember, not all of the internet’s users are people sitting at web browsers). A domain name functions as an alias, allowing a site to avoid having its name tied to the physical infrastructure supporting it while still allowing the underlying IP address to be organized in hierarchical blocks. Keeping IPs organized in continuous blocks (rather than offering some version of telephone number portability) makes routing easier to implement efficiently.

The idea that people will type in a site name seems a remnant of an earlier era and really needs to be rethought. Bookmarks and other personal convenience features also make direct typing less likely.

Haven’t we gotten along with a numeric system for phone number for over 100 years? The needed access tools like phone books and directory assistance evolved to solve the problems. The internet is no different.

Every new tld is a brand new namespace, and the structure of the DNS means that (unlike IP routing tables) it’s easier to scale to fit a bigger set of lookup tables.

great: even more scope for incompatability, impenetrability and other hilarious things. if only everywhere with a machine-unfriendly writing system had had an Ataturk…

This is ridiculously wasteful, surely? Perhaps what’s needed is a .unique domain, in which no one person or organisation is allowed more than one registration.

Kieran’s point is, in effect, that this control over terminal strings means no one can currently have a name ending in “.new” because .new hasn’t been created (allowed) yet. So “first-choice.new” hasn’t yet been snaffled up by a PPC farmer or some other squatter.

But what happens when .new is allowed? The same squatters will send their bots to the .new registrars. And very soon you need .newer, and so on.

The “name-exhaustion” problem is different in this respect from the exhaustion of IPv4 numbers (or seven-digit phone numbers), which really can be resolved by making more numbers available for new users and devices.

I see the main virtue of TLD expansion as creating a rallying point for communities that don’t have an online identity, or for niche users. So that’s more about creating new use TLDs, rather than expanding the namespace to accommodate the growth in current use patterns. But that’s just my personal view.

m

But still, if TLDs (as opposed to domain names generally) are there so there can be a Chinese and an Indian “crookedtimber” I don’t see why they need to be such a fundamental part of the architecture. How can a fixed menu of TLDs give you flexibility you can’t get from the unlimited-length alphanumeric site name? I mean, if crookedtimber.ru wasn’t an option, the site name could always be crookedtimberru or crookedrussiantimber or whatever.

One point of having many TLDs is that it multiplies the number of potential and available names, which is increasingly important as more of the world starts to use the Internet.

Another thing to remember is that domain names aren’t used only for websites, but also for email addressing. I’d hate to think what would happen to an email that was simply addressed ‘Maria Farrell’ and sent off into the ether.