MEDIA: ICANN rejects .xxx domain

Fri May 12 19:45:46 UTC 2006

On May 12, 2006 at 14:51 tv at pobox.com (Todd Vierling) wrote:
 > The complexity added by TLDs has one extremely critical good side
 > effect:  distribution of load by explicitly avoiding a flat entity
 > namespace.  The DNS has a hierarchical namespace for a reason, and
 > arguments to the contrary will convince on the order of sqrt(-1)
 > people.

As if you couldn't just hash on whatever the last component is and
pick a server on that basis? Query(server[Sum(bytes) mod Nservers])?

There are probably good answers to people's suggestions for change but
working backwards from "that's the way we've always done it" with
trailing remarks intended to stifle a response isn't, to my mind, an
answer.

The best answer I can think of off-hand is that dropping .com etc
wouldn't add much, if anything. Any savings in typing would be off-set
by having to generate non-colliding names which would've been .com and
.org, etc. It would just be creating a new TLD, the null TLD moving
collision avoidance left by one.

As to .XXX:

To my mind the real camel's nose in the tent is that to create it
would seem to urge or at least validate its enforcement and coercive
means would necessarily arise (civil lawsuits, criminal charges,
regulatory apparatus.)

Otherwise of what use would it be, in terms of the conceptions of its
champions as opposed to unintended consequences?

The deeper problem is the conception by many (unwashed) that someone
must be in charge, we used to get calls asking for contact info for
the Internet complaint dept, and they didn't mean us. People were
often shocked to hear that we had no answer.

And widespread conceptions like that have a way of materializing, sans
some force of resistance.

I suppose some may say it's 10 years too late for that comment.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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