.COM TLD, DNS and the English Language

[Aveek Datta <MoNoLiTH+@CMU.EDU>]

Excerpts from internet.listserv.iahc-discuss: 10-Dec-96 Re: New TLDs and
Registry c.. by Vince Wolodkin@digitalin 
> No problem, then they are xyz.com.us.  Since they have the federal
> trademark, no other xyz but them can have xyz.com.us.

So basically you want to make .com. in all ISO country domains be similar to
the proposed .TM domain but for federal trademarks in the given trademark. A
nice idea, but why exclude us who do not have a trademark but want a short
name too? Why do I have to stick with ml.pgh.pa.us when 

   a) Monolith is used at least 50% by people outside the US
   b) Monolith's primary DNS server is in New York City
   c) Monolith's primary Web server is in New Jersey
   d) Monolith's secondary nameservers are everywhere

I do not have a trademark nor is Monolith even registered officially
anyhwere. Yet its short and known presence at http://www.ml.org lets it be
easily found. I do also own monolith.org, but I'm giving that up since I
cant' afford to pay for it, and I am hoping for less domain collisions using
the two letters "ml".

Sure I do believe that trademark owners deserve protection; maybe using
.TM.country and .TM.locality.country be appropiate. I do not know how TM
rules really work, so these are just clueless suggestions. But the bottom
line is the average user and small company (and even not-so-small
organizations) deserve short names.

Of cousre, like Monolith does, we could all reside in .ORG and so on, but
then .ORG would simply become the mess .COM is in now. Rather than
converting .COM into a trademark only domain, it seems to make sense to
create precedent of using "TM".

One interesting other fact I note is that many companies are registering
.COM domains rather than expanding leftwards. For example, IBM uses the DNS
system correctly:

   http://www.software.ibm.com

etc. But on the other hand

   http://www.foxsports.com

Is the FOX network's sports section. Instead of
http://www.sports.foxnetwork.com, they choose that. Why? Because regular
English speaking people read from left to right. I can understand why the
dot-separate form for DNS was used, but why the opposite of the way most of
us expect? I know thsi seems weird now, but without the current precedent,
wouldn't

   http://com.ibm.software
   http://com.fox.sports

Make more sense? If you look at the list of TLDs, it seems that people are
trying to convert DNS to be more like English-speak....

In any case, there's too much precedent to reverse domain names even if we
wanted to, which I don't know if we do. However,food for thought.

 Aveek Datta           _ _ _   _                Email: aveek@andrew.cmu.edu
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