A critical analysis of this article could take a very long time. I’ll therefore restrict my comments to the part of your article which sets off every mental alarm bell I have: the phasing out of generics, like “.com”.

This proposal doesn’t pass the laugh test. At July 2005, there were over forty million registered “.com” domain names. What force on earth is going to persuade those registrants that they should subject themselves to the financial thumbscrews? What percentage of Internet users are going to welcome the inconvenience of their “.com” email address being phased out? Or the URL of their favourite portal, search engine, or bank changing? Or the breakage of every legacy URL involving a “.com”?

If you don’t like “.com”, you’re welcome to mask it out in your local resolver configuration. Good luck persuading the rest of the world to join you, though! VeriSign might like your idea of exponentially increasing fees (if they get to keep the cash—not part of your plan, but they can try), but even they are likely to see that this isn’t going to work, dollar signs notwithstanding. The rest of the world will ask you the very pointed question, “why on earth would we want to do that?”

I put it to you that if you were granted the position of Supreme Benevolent Dictator of ICANN, and made phasing out “.com” part of your stated policy, you’d precipitate a popular uprising faster than you can say “Jon Postel”. Regardless of whatever else happens, “.com” is a legacy we’re going to be stuck with for a long time to come.

Indeed, phasing out the generics like .com would be perhaps insurmountably hard.  In fact, that people would cling to it so much is to some degree evidence of why it was a mistake.

As I’ve noted in the related essays, trademark law has known for centuries that you should not grant monopoly rights over generic terms.  Yet that is, in essence what we have done.  No wonder that people want so much to have them.  The dark side is easier, quicker, more seductive.  Who wouldn’t love to own generic terms?

So what ways are there to correct the mistake, where we made .com special, and created a foolish scarcity in what should have been an infinite sea?  The ever-escalating rates are simply an example proposal.  The real core idea is that no one entity should control naming—instead there should be many competing systems, competing on policy as well as price, all on a level playing field.

We can’t have that level playing field when a few generic TLDs are elevated above the rest for legacy reasons.  Until we fix that, we’ll have battles, like the potential one between the USA and EU.

That people would cling to “.com” is evidence that we’ve grown somewhat dependent on names in that space. That it became so disproportionately popular in the first place is evidence that it was a mistake—perhaps. Given that the larger companies tend to buy their name in every available namespace, it’s not clear to me what naming strategy would have been better up-front, even with the benefit of hindsight. Cornucopia, perhaps, although I’m obviously biased on that account, and it takes hindsight to see its benefits.

I’m still highly dubious that trademark law is a pattern we want to follow. Trademark is specific to a region and to a field of business, whereas domain names are absolutely global. If we were to genuinely apply trademark to the DNS problem, we would insist that all registered names include the region and field of business (in addition to the trademark name) to remove ambiguity. Given that geography, at least, is hierarchical in nature, we would probably have names like “joes-pizza.tm.san-jose.ca.us”, and “ibm-computer.tm.int”. The “tm” sub-component is included in order to allow names that aren’t trademarks (e.g. government entities) room in the overall namespace. Details aside, anything that doesn’t involve this level of verbosity isn’t really following trademark.

You say, “no one entity should control naming—instead there should be many competing systems, competing on policy as well as price, all on a level playing field.” This sounds very nice, but it’s the kind of statement that can have “and every girl should have a pony” appended to it without impacting its practicality. And aside from the fact that there’s no suggestion of a practical means to achieve the end, I’m not at all persuaded that your prescription for a better world actually results in the better world you describe. The idea that an oversight committee could have a set of principles which were both adequate and so simple that “disputes over them are few, and deviation from the principles is obvious” sounds more like wishful thinking than a plan. I’d like to see these principles spelled out, since I suspect they’ll be controversial in actual practice.

In short, if you’re saying, “this is a bitter pill that I offer, but it’s for your own good,” people are going to agree with the part about it being bitter, and doubt the part about it being good. Some hard evidence of actual benefit is in order.

I see a few options.  The ICANN system has a single entity with battles for control.  It hands out monopoly rights over generic terms like .com/.museum/.mobi and people battle over them.  It gets battles over .xxx and the like.

The alternative is multiple competing systems.  Instead of battle, most contention is solved by competition.  You don’t like how one autonomous TLD does it, you try another.  The only contention comes from those who want not just their own way but to control everybody else.  They exist, but there are fewer of them.

I don’t think that’s a pipe dream, we have systems like that in many spaces.  The hard part is how to make a level playing field for the autonomous TLDs.  If they get ownership of generic terms, then there is contention because one is inherently better than another.  I am not proposing we adopt trademark law with its jurisdictions and geographic locales (where did you get that?) but that we listen to the lesson of centuries of trademark experience—you don’t let people get monopoly rights on generics.

There are other options for level playing fields, but I think the lessons from the field of branding are probably the best understood.  But I’m happy to see other suggestions.  It’s hard to defend the status quo in my book, no playing field at all, just one player.

I’m also very open to alternate suggestions for how to move to a level playing field.  The legacy makes it hard, but even competition in an unfair system, where Network Solutions gets a leg-up for legacy reasons, is better than one body setting all the rules for naming when there’s no good reason for that to exist.

Brad, my point with regards to trademark and branding is that the differences between those ideas and the domain name system render dubious any “lessons” we might learn from them. Given the differences, are the supposed parallels actually parallel in any meaningful way? Are the lessons from trademark applicable to the DNS? Yes, they have superficial similarities, but they also have deep differences. Do the reasons why generic terms are not allowed as trademarks apply to the DNS? I’m highly sceptical that they do.

That’s not to say that generic terms aren’t significant in some way. On the contrary, I’d argue that they are, but I don’t think trademark law can shed any useful light on why it’s so—it just confuses things. Basic economics, on the other hand, gives us something of a model by which to understand the situation, and you’ve been adopting economic language in talking about a “level playing field”. I think you should abandon analogies with trademark and concentrate on the economic aspects: the whys and wherefores of trademark aren’t always applicable to DNS, but supply and demand is supply and demand.

Given that you simply can’t get rid of “.com” in any time-frame worth talking about, what additional naming structure would you put in place as an alternative? Would anyone be interested in adopting it as a matter of free choice, or would we need to engage in active governance (in the form of subsidies) in order to create incentives? Explain how your policy with regards to generic terms furthers your goals.

While some see getting rid of .com as impossible, I think anything is possible over a decade horizon.  After all, to most of the world, .com didn’t even exist a decade ago.

However, to counter what I’ve just said, it is the case that DNS is starting to replace the trademark system, which is why its lessons are important.  Today, it is the norm, before choosing how to brand a product or a startup, to make sure the a good domain name for the brand will be available, most of the time with an insistence on .com.  If you can get your brand as a domain in .com, it is believed you simplify a great deal the path to finding your web site.

People are also considering other things, like whether you will be able to find it in google.  That’s a two edged sword.  A coined term will be readily found in any search engine, but will also make criticism easily found.

My main point is that we’ll never get the best system through committee meetings and trans-national bodies.  Not even close.  Only when the public can choose among competing systems will that happen.  And there is no reason (unless you feel a need to control everybody, everywhere as WIPO does) not to have competing, largely autonomous systems.

However, they won’t compete well if one is inherently better than the others on day 1.  If I can have a domain like .museum or .xxx, then no matter how bad I am in other ways, I am still the likely choice for certain types of users.  And of course, .com/.net/.org and the rest have a big legacy boost which ideally we would like to be rid of.

Though I do agree we won’t be rid of it any time soon, I don’t pronounce that goal to be impossible.  However, we’ve had to deal with the problem of encouraging the flourishing of competition in the face of a legacy monopoly before—there are solutions.

I think that significance of domain names as identifiers of personal and
corporate entities is QUICKLY vanishing.

Look at how most internet users use the net. If they want to find something,
the go to Google or another search engine and enter a search phrase and
click on links that come up. How many of them notice the domain name in
the URL? Not many.

Domain names are still used for other things, but they are quickly becoming
like IP addresses - behind the scenes identifiers.

It used to be that domain names were human-readable, easy to remember identifiers
for hosts. People remember names easier than numbers. Its also easy to renumber
your hosts if need be without loosing your identity on the net.

Now, the end user doesn’t worry about domain names anymore - we have another
level of indirection, which is even more intuitive for the average user.

Soon, domain names will only serve a purpose to allow a link between search
engines and hosts. IP addresses are neccessarily organized in a hierarchy for
structural, technical reasons and renumbering is sometimes neccessary if you
change ISP’s for instance. Domain names will serve the purpose to maintain a
link from search engine to host name, but end users are increasingly insulated
from them.

All of this hullabaloo over domain names in Tunisia is just a bunch of
political chest-thumping because the world doesn’t like George Bush and what
he’s done in Iraq. I think the era of domains as identifying monikers is over
already. Time moves on, old technologies vanish or loose some of their original
use. Such is the case with DNS.

People are using search more but not to the extent you say, and people are still fighting over domain names.

Domain names were primarily created for E-mail, and they are still used for that today, and every person in the world puts their e-mail address on their business card, and it needs to be readable, memorable and typable.  And people don’t want to use search in this context for a variety of reasons.  When you give a domain on a business card or brochure, you want people to use it to easily get to you and only you.  The importance of that is not going away.

Once you get into replies the domain goes into the address book and becomes less relevant, but the intial contact needs the domain.  And doesn’t want search because the consequences of sending an e-mail to the wrong place are vastly greater than accidentally picking up the wrong web page.