This is the first part of a 2-part series article arguing that the decentralization of the Internet will allow the DNS to recede to its earlier, uncontroversial role, before all the lawsuits and screaming matches at ICANN board meetings.

Is it just me, or are we paying less attention to the Domain Name System than we used to? Seems like only a few years ago that the tech-culture world was attuned to every new angle in the ongoing struggle over the DNS’ management. You couldn’t read the front page of Slashdot without catching one heavily commented-upon story on alternate registries, trademark disputes, or the latest ICANN board meeting.

But today? Hardly a peep. Not because the problems have magically solved themselves: The MPAA, for example, just sent a cease-and-desist letter to a blogger with the domain name www.ratednc-17.com. But a story like this won’t draw the same attention it would have before. And by the way, what ever happened to those new top-level domains, like .biz, .info, and .name? Some of those are two years old and wide open for business—homesteads desperate for homesteaders.

This could be simply a temporary development. If the economy picks up we might see an uptick in the number of dot-coms suing hapless webmasters, and our outrage might rise accordingly. Or maybe we’ve just been exceptionally distracted of late: ICANN pales in comparison to the new crop of acronyms—MPAA, RIAA, DMCA, TIA, USA PATRIOT—menacing us today.

But perhaps these trends obscure a deeper shift. At the beginning of the boom, the vast quantity of people and organizations online outstripped our ability to find them, and we pressed the DNS into service to help fill that gap. But this usage of the centralized, permanent DNS conflicted with the common-sense methods that people use to name things in their everyday lives, and as the internet continues to decentralize this dissonance only grows stronger. The conflict is being alleviated not by technical or political reform at the center of the network, but by innovation at its edges. As end-user applications mature, they increasingly allow individuals to develop and share their own naming systems—not to destroy the DNS, but to render it irrelevant.

Just another pyramid scheme?

The reasons that the DNS started to crumble under the pressure of commercialization have already been well documented. Writing in 1998, Ted Byfield noted that the DNS was never designed for that pressure in the first place:

“DNS was built around the structurally conservative assumptions of a particular social stratum: government agencies, the military, universities, and their hybrid organizations—in other words, hierarchical institutions subject to little or no competition. These assumptions were built into DNS in theory, and they guide domain-name policy in practice to this day—even though the commercialization of the Net has turned many if not most of these assumptions upside down.”

One of the assumptions Byfield is referring to is the notion that name collisions could be greatly reduced by dividing the namespace into top-level domains and trusting that everybody would calmly accept their place in that hierarchy. But as domain names became associated with trademarks, common usage flattened these tidy divisions into one undifferentiated sprawl. Corporations saw the web as one more front in the battle for marketing and public relations—like television, only with a keyboard—and accordingly they didn’t care much for quaint rules written by computer scientists. So when, say, Archie Comics sued a California man for registering veronica.org in honor of his daughter, arguments that the .org TLD didn’t belong to companies fell on deaf ears. (Online protest eventually succeeded where quoting RFCs had failed, although today veronica.org redirects to SamsDirect.)

Many reformers aimed for a political solution, appealing to ICANN to keep the DNS safe for bit players. They felt that in kowtowing to the corporations, ICANN was bastardizing the simplicity of the system that Jon Postel had managed until handing it off in 1998. (When the final draft proposal for ICANN was finished, Wired called Postel “the Internet’s own Obi-Wan Kenobi”—a phrase that would attain an eerie resonance with the Slashdot crowd when Postel passed away a month later and ICANN revealed itself to be a bit of an Evil Empire.)

But would even a perfectly managed DNS have functioned in accordance with its earlier hierarchical vision? The hierarchy made sense to the users of the early internet, but the noisier commercialized internet would have fit much less comfortably into such a scheme. Even if you could’ve assigned every person, place, and thing its proper slot, most people would not have bothered to learn what went where.

Take, for example, the .museum TLD, which has been open since 2001. Most prominent museums have avoided using this TLD; the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art all place their primary domain names under .org. Conceptually, .museum muddies the waters because it’s not mutually exclusive with .org. And when it comes to marketing, .museum is a disaster since it only serves to distract the user—who ever heard of a six-letter TLD?—without making her life any easier.

Or to take a more high-profile example, look at the recent lawsuit that forced the World Wrestling Federation to change its name to World Wrestling Entertainment. The World Wildlife Fund had sued the Federation for breaking the terms of a 1994 contract dictating who could use the initials WWF, in what media, and how prominently. Now, strictly speaking this wasn’t solely an issue of domain names. The Fund’s spokeswoman attributed the suit to an “explosion” of the acronym’s use in three media: online, satellite TV, and cable TV. But one of the major grievances in the Fund’s suit was the Federation’s registration of the domain name www.wwf.com in 1997.

According to the neighborly rules of the pre-boom internet, this should not have been a problem: The Federation got wwf.com and the Fund got wwf.org. This solution works if you care about those tidy hierarchical divisions. Most people don’t. This is one of the reasons that the new TLDs have been so underwhelming: People don’t see the world as cleanly divided into discrete categories, with the corporations in this corner and the non-profits in that corner. It’s all one namespace to them.

Mutually exclusive hierarchies are convenient, but they only work on a small group of items. Once that group gets too big and diverse—a comic book artist here, an airplane-parts manufacturer there—any hierarchy that might reasonably hold that group becomes too cumbersome for people to use. When people want to organize large groups of items they often find it easier to use overlapping sets instead. That’s why filesystems have symlinks. That’s why many of Apple’s OS X programs, such as iTunes and Address Book, let you drag-and-drop your MP3s or contacts into as many groups as you want. Why bother fretting over whether you should put Christine from work in your Friends group or your Coworkers group? Put her in both and get on with your life.

Six billion naming systems and just one internet

A hierarchical, precise DNS is a perfect system for computers. Human beings, however, prefer to rely on systems that make use of their own technical strengths, such as the ability to adapt their language to the preconceptions of your audience, and the ability to adapt their own conception of the world to accommodate new knowledge. Common sense, in other words. If, in the days when World Wrestling Entertainment was still a federation, you used the initials WWF in a conversation, chances are your listener would be able to figure out which one you were referring to. Humans do this by drawing on the context of the conversation to make the correct match. Are you talking about panda bears, or Stone Cold Steve Austin?

In real life, people have almost no problem resolving name collisions—a good thing, considering how often they happen. There are two types of Dove bars you can buy in a supermarket: One is chocolate and the other is soap. There are three famous Dres in hip-hop: Dr. Dre of NWA, Dre of Outkast, and Dre of Dre and Ed Lover. Hip-hop fans know how to tell them apart.

It happens on a personal level, too. In my freshman year of college, my dorm floor had four Mikes and four Daves. We resolved these name collisions by settling on nicknames for everybody: Big Dave, Sophomore Dave, Asshole Dave, etc. People who lived outside our floor didn’t know who was who, but they didn’t need that system anyway. We did, and it worked fine for us.

What we didn’t do, however, was make use of last names, even though they offer a more global, permanent method of differentiation. Last names were less memorable to us than the jokey, college-guy associations we could invent on our own. Clay Shirky wrote that the aims of the DNS are to be memorable, global, and non-political. “Pick two”, he said, but in fact most of the time people only care about the first: As long as names are memorable, people don’t mind that they’re local and highly subjective. Techies are an exception, since they spend much of their time crafting language for machines, and as such are accustomed to treating language as a brittle, precise tool. But most people like their language loose and contextual, thank you very much, and the hierarchies of the DNS demanded a rigor that never seemed worth the trouble to them.

Continue to read part 2 of this article.