ROVIN'
AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE
So
many times, as I use the Internet, I wish that we could declare a moratorium on
it—its technology, its economy, its community.
We need a time-out until we can all figure just where we are and where we
are going with this amazing technology. One
of the basic realities of the Internet that is giving us some trouble these days
is the concept of domains, the "dot-com" (and "dot-org" and
"dot-net") names that seem to be everywhere these days.
A domain name, represented by a URL (Universal
Resource Locator), is not so much a street address (321 Peanut Promenade) as it
is a whole street, and on that street there are houses, some of which have
apartments. And in those houses and apartments, there are rooms, in which
there are closets and cabinets. And
so, we can work out way down from a top level domain (TLD) or street such as http://www.peanut.org,
through its various levels of houses (/users),
apartments (/mike),
rooms (/text),
and finally cabinets (/tld)
until we reach our very specific destination, represented by the URL for this
article, http://www.peanut.org/users/mike/text/tld.htm.
So, what is the problem?
If
you live on Peanut Promenade, you can feel reasonably certain that there is not
another Peanut Promenade in your city (note: this does not apply for anything
named Peachtree in Atlanta). Your
address is distinctly your own. Domain
names do not come with such certainty. I've
already raved about how to get a domain name in an earlier article, "Who
Wants to Be a Webmaster?"
in which you can learn about ICANN,
the Internet Association for Assigned Names and Numbers, which has recently been
in the news.
There is a real problem with top-level
domains. Simply, we are running out
of them. Try it sometime. Type the
strangest combination you can imagine between "www." and
".com" in the address bar
of your browser, and chances are, you will find something.
Increasingly, you will find a notice that you have reached a site that
has not been developed, and you may get information on purchasing that domain
name if you wish.
To
meet the growing need for domain names, ICANN accepted applications for new
domain suffixes and posted a list
of those applications in October 2000. This month (November 2000), it approved seven
of them.
(And, of course, you can click on the highlighted words, hyperlinks, to
find those lists.)
Domain
names are big business, and many people wanted to know the earliest possible
moment that they could begin registering the new domains, because domain names
are on a first-come, first-serve basis. One
registrar, RegLand, has filed a lawsuit
against ICANN about what it perceived to be ICANN's mishandling of the
situation.
Now,
we can expect a flood of new and increasingly specialized domain names.
There is another source of domain names, and that is for the names that
end in two-letter combinations such as "dot-to" and "dot-tv,"
codes assigned to countries. Just
as small countries used to make money from the sale of their exotic postage
stamps, now they sell their exotic domain names, and you cannot be sure that a
"dot-tv" domain is in fact in Tuvalu, any more than that a
"dot-to" domain is in Tonga. And
where, pray tell, is Tuvalu? Well,
I'll let you feel as geographically challenged as I felt when I read the list of
country codes from the Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority.
Just a
hint to the leaders of Gabon: I have an idea where you could peddle a lot of your
"dot-ga" domains.
Cyber-squatters
and identity
hijackers are
increasing the pressure on the domain name supply.
Those two terms (as well as domain name speculators and some others that
I can't share with readers in a community free-net) are more or less
interchangeable, referring to people who buy domain names that have some
recognition and that might be worth some money.
There is, for example, an infamous domain name
that sounds as if it would be the Internet address of a famous building in
American history, but it turns out to be a porno-site.
Some people register domains that include the names of celebrities such
as Madonna
either to gain some recognition or notoriety for their site or, perhaps, to sell
it to the celebrity. The Madonna
case (the hyperlink takes you to information on her case) shows how many
problems we have to deal with. Who
actually owns a single name like Madonna? Unlike, say, Ralph
Waldo Emerson. How much can we judge the intent behind some domain
registrations? Which is more
important—the freedom of speech or the right to privacy?
The
answer is... I honestly do not have any answers.
As a writer, I certainly cherish the freedom of expression, but having
registered four domain names myself, I don't want people squatting in or near
them in such a way to detract from them. To
help you consider some answers, here is a radio
discussion
that you can listen to. If you want to write a book on the subject, you could
find just about everything you need at the Cybersquatting
and Internet Address & Domain Name Disputes Archive
of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation.
I began this article ravin' about the possibility of shutting down the Internet for a while, but as I continued to write, I realized that this article is in many ways a celebration of the freedom of the Internet. Instead of actually writing very much, I've given you quite a few hyperlinks and some commentary to link those links together. I purposely chose not to list the seven new domains, hoping that you will have enough curiosity that you'll want to check them out through the hyperlink.
A friend of mine
remarked after reading a similar article that I must have been lazy
that week, but that's not the case. The
more links I include, the more time I spend working the search engines and
following the links in other articles. But,
this is what writing for the Internet—or developing content, as it is
called—is all about, not creating a flat text on a flat page but creating a
multi-dimensional object that fits into the almost organic whole of the
Internet. Keep your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, and your
browser pointing to all the very-specifically named resources of cyberspace.
Rovin' on the Internet: Online Adventures