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DNS Structure: Introduction

Part 5

It's A Namespace, Not A Horserace!

In all the debates about domain names, lots of inappropriate metaphors get bandied about. Messages sprout up often in various forums that say "Dot Com is King!" (So what is "Dot Org", queen, prince, or court jester?) Others say that .com is the winner, .org and .net are distantly in the money as "place" and "show", and all other TLDs, old and new, are also-rans. A recent message even said "Rock on, Dot-Com!", as if this TLD were a rock group, in addition to being a monarch and a racehorse.

Those messages were from proponents of the use of .com as if it were the only TLD in a flat namespace. Opponents often buy into the same metaphors themselves, when they promote some alternative TLD, like a country code being "repurposed" as a generic TLD (.tv, .md, .cc), a new TLD being added by ICANN (.info, .biz), or an alternative root system's TLDs (new.net) as a "dark horse" they expect to make a big burst of speed in the future and unseat .com as rightful ruler of the namespace.

All of this is misguided. If one thinks of the domain name system in the manner in which it was intended, as a logical namespace for the naming of entities on the Internet, then it makes no sense to regard one TLD as "ruling" over the others, or of beating them in a race, or of "rocking on" for its fans and groupies. They're simply different parts of a naming system, intended for different purposes, just as in the telephone numbering system area code 212 is for phone numbers in New York City while area code 213 is for Los Angeles. Do you speak of one area code, or zip code, as "ruling" over the others?

In what way has .com "beaten" .org, or .edu, or .museum? By having more Web sites and email addresses? There are more commercial businesses than universities or museums, certainly, but does this mean that the more numerous entities "rule"? This isn't a situation where majority-rules applies. If you're looking for higher education, you'll go to a university to find it, not a gas station, even though the latter exist in greater numbers. If you're looking for a university Web site, you'll look in .edu, not .gov or .com. The different TLDs are different, not "better" or "worse" than one another.

Businesses will sometimes get the street in front of them renamed, and get exceptions to the house numbering system, to get the address they want, like "One Disk Drive" for a computer company or "711 Winners Circle" for a casino. There are varying degrees of prestige associated with particular streets, cities, and even zip codes and area codes, which will sometimes be taken into account when people and businesses decide where to locate. Phone numbers will sometimes be contorted to spell things for a business campaign, and there have even been disputes involving toll free numbers that are remarkably similar to domain "cybersquatting" cases, where companies are accused of taking away one another's business by getting an intentionally similar phone number. Some companies have felt compelled to get the same number in each of the several toll-free area codes, 800, 888, and 877, much like registering the same domain in .com, .org, and .net, defeating the purpose of the creation of these additional area codes to increase the number of available toll-free numbers for the many companies that want them.

However, the difference in such cases is that they are acknowledged by practically everybody to be a minor sideshow of the addressing systems as a whole. Nobody claims with a straight face that the system of assigning telephone numbers or the system of assigning street addresses exists exclusively, or primarily, for the purpose of marketing, branding, and trademark protection. Rather, those addressing systems exist primarily to provide logically structured identifiers for all the telephones and postal delivery locations in the world. That they're occasionally used or abused for marketing purposes is incidental, and it doesn't cause the entire system to be restructured in a way that's less logical but better suited to the marketing people or the corporate lawyers. So why is the domain name system treated otherwise?

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