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DNS Structure: Old Top Level Domains

Part 2

Uses and Abuses

Political parties and candidates are among the entities that fit best in the .org domain. While some candidates may really be "for sale", they probably don't want this as their public image, so the commercial .com domain doesn't really make much sense for their campaign sites. It's a sign of the dumbing-down of the Internet over the last four years that most of the U.S. Presidential and congressional campaign sites that have popped up for the 2000 races are in .com domains; in the 1996 races (the first to use the Internet in a big way) they usually made correct use of .org.

An unrelated point on campaign sites, as well as any other site for a temporarily-significant thing (e.g., a particular convention or other event): if you are creating a site for such a thing then you should try to "think generic" when registering a domain for it, and try to pick a name that will be usable for future things, and not just be tied to a single occurrence and obsolete after it. For instance, if it's a campaign site for Joe Schmoe, running for some office in 2004, joeschmoe.org or voteforjoe.org are better names than joeschmoe2004.org, because the latter is useful only in 2004, but the former ones can be reused by Joe for any future campaigns he might be running in. 

Unfortunately, the use of .com is so entrenched that sometimes, even when somebody specifically requests registration of a .org (or other) domain, they'll wind up with the .com version by mistake!

Even the U.S. government has joined the "domain abuse frenzy" of using clearly inappropriate top-level domains. They already have complete control of the .gov and .mil domains, but that hasn't stopped them from getting a few .com addresses themselves: The U.S. Postal Service used usps.gov properly for years, but later decided to use usps.com as its primary address, and has also registered other domains such as stampsonline.com.

Wouldn't such addresses as stamps.usps.gov, jobs.navy.mil, and go.army.mil have been more logical? These would identify unambiguously that these domains were official sites of the agencies in question, with no chance that they're really unaffiliated sites grabbed by pranksters or scammers, like whitehouse.com, a site completely unconnected with the White House (actually, a porn site, which some might say is related to the White House after the sex scandals there)?

A news story shows one of the problems that came about due to the Navy's illogical domain usage. Apparently, they had a number of .com domains for different recruiting offices, like navydallas.com, etc., and forgot to renew some of them; this resulted in at least one of them getting re-registered by somebody else as a porn site, a big embarrassment to the Navy. This would never happen with .mil domains, which are unavailable for registration by non-military entities. Also, if they used logical subdomains like dallas.navy.mil, they wouldn't have so many different domain registrations to track that they might forget to renew some of them. Using the system properly works better for everybody.

Are Multiple TLDs Too Confusing?

As part of the general dumbing-down of the Internet as it went mainstream and commercial, there seems to be a sizable body of opinion to the effect that having more than one TLD, with different sites potentially found at the same name in a different TLD, is "too confusing" for the user. Some ICANN dispute panels have held such opinions, regarding a domain as cybersquatting by definition if it matched the name of a famous site in a different TLD. However, part of the charm and serendipity that makes the Internet so interesting is the fact that there can be highly diverse things under the same name in different parts of the namespace.

Some corporate types would like to bulldoze over all of this variety in order to make the Internet safe for their marketing schemes. And some are playing into their hands by registering lots of domains that resemble famous addresses and putting up obnoxious sites that pop up lots of annoying windows at people who go there by mistake, creating some public sentiment against "cybersquatters". However, there is plenty of reasonable use of similar names in different TLDs, for different companies and organizations that happen to have similar names or acronyms, as well as by people operating protest or parody sites that have valid fair-use rights to the name. Suppressing all of them would make the Internet a poorer place. Maybe the big corporate types would like the Internet to have the homogeneity of a shopping mall or fast food chain, but is that in the interests of the users?

Reserved Names

It's been a contentious issue regarding the new TLDs whether there should be any "reserved names" that are protected from being registered in any new TLD without special authorization. Various entities have proposed all sorts of things, from globally famous trademarks to geographic place names to generic drug names, to be reserved. It's a lesser-known fact that the current TLDs have some reserved names in effect already. They were snuck in recently as part of revisions to the contract between ICANN and Verisign to operate the registry for .com, .net, and .org. Names on the reserve list are barred from registration, but anyone who already has such a name is still allowed to renew it (so long as it's not taken away by the dispute process). Among reserved words are all one and two letter names, the names of other TLDs (current and proposed), and various words and acronyms that relate to ICANN or IANA (the organizations that run the domain name system).

Want to grab an expired name?

Because of the recent boom-and-bust cycle of Internet business ventures, there are a lot of domain names that are expiring now due to non-renewal, because they were registered by speculators who never managed to unload them, or they were registered as part of a failed and bankrupt e-commerce scheme. Some pretty good names are dropping back into the available pool as a result, giving other people a chance to get them.

Unfortunately, there are still enough speculators and opportunists around that they have created problems in the registration system in their attempts to get the expired names the second they become available.

Because of this, ICANN announced a temporary change in policy at Verisign's request, imposing a temporary moratorium on releasing any expired domains until a scheme can be instituted to get them back into the general pool without causing undue strain on the database. However, after a couple of weeks a new announcement indicated that release of expired domains would resume on Aug. 30, 2001, with new restrictions on access to the registry by automated scripts to prevent the congestion that occurred before.

Verisign has long been accused of holding back expired domains so that they can be channeled into its own domain-auction business, but they have always denied this.

Making ".com" Part of your Company Name?

It was trendy for a while for new (and newly renamed) Internet companies to use their domain name (suffix and all) as their legal corporate name. The Internet site is a distinct entity from the company or organization which owns it, and the ".com" (or ".org", ".edu", etc.) address designates the site, not the company. A company going onto the Internet should pick a domain name based in some manner on its name (e.g, IBM has "ibm.com" and Microsoft has "microsoft.com"), but naming the company after the Internet site is "putting the cart before the horse."

Some business-press writers used "dot-coms" as a somewhat sneering reference to more-hype-than-substance Internet companies. Even TV Guide got tired of "dot-com" companies intruding on Super Bowl viewers, making some sneering references to them in their special Super Bowl issue. Somebody in San Francisco conducted an "anti-dot-com" campaign, putting up stickers lampooning "dot-com mania" by "promoting" such ridiculous and nonexistent sites as AnythingIFoundInMyGarageForSale.com. Meanwhile, the Swedish trademark office announced that they were no longer allowing the registration of company names containing domain or URL suffixes or prefixes, like .com, .se (the Swedish country code), or http://www. Those were among the "early adopters" of the anti-dot-com backlash, but now that position has become mainstream, and companies stick domain suffixes on their names at their own peril.

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