Re: Competing Domain-Name Registries Creating Tower of Cyber-Babel

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Fri, 06 Jul 2001 12:22:29 +0200, Anthony Atkielski <anthony at atkielski.com>  said:
> I'm aware of that, but only one machine in the world can have a given IP
> address, and only one machine can have a given FQDN.

False and False.  There's probably several tens of thousands of machines
using the same RFC1918 space, and Akamai plays some rather interesting
routing games with duplicate IP addresses to get you to the closest one.
Also, you might want to check how many different IP addresses 'aol.com'
can resolve to (including their MX farm).

> No, I'm just acknowledging the reality of user interfaces, as I illustrated in
> my example.  Nobody wants to type Coca-Cola-GA, because the state in which the
> company is based has no relevance for the user.  Similarly, there's no point in
> typing bills-tv-repair.shop when the .shop suffix has no relevance for the user
> (he already knows what Bill's TV Repair is).

Remember that ABC.COM was originally ABC Design Studios in Seattle, a small
graphics shop.  This came as quite a surprise to a slower-moving distributor
of television media.

The *true* broken-ness of the DNS stems from the fact that we're using it as
a white pages service (which it isn't).  This in and of itself would not be
quite so fatal, if it weren't for the fact that the current setup of the DNS
does not accurately reflect trademark law (where trademarks are held by
a company *in a field of business*, and *in a geographic area*).  That's why
you can have an ABC Design Studios and an ABC TV network - they are in
different fields.

The DNS as set up currently doesn't understand that.

> > Another point: I cannot register kolehmainen.fi
> > as my domain name, since that would be grossly
> > unfair to all the other individuals with the same
> > surname in Finland, which I find quite acceptable.

> So who _can_ "fairly" register this domain name?

A case could be made that there *is* *no* fair registration possible.

-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

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