On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Paul Wouters <paul(_at_)nohats(_dot_)ca>
wrote:
On Fri, 12 Jul 2013, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
And I don't expect things to be different this time round. But in ten
years time it will be obvious that
domains are going to be dotless and three of the biggest dotless domains
are going to be called .apple and .microsoft and .google and they are going
to be the companies writing much of
the software used to connect to the Internet and their commercial
interests are not exactly best served by supporting clapped out thirty year
old software programs.
I notice you are missing .oracle and .exchange and .mail. Is that
because you can't take any more slaps on the back or because you know
too many companies that have servers in their domain that would get
bypassed by your awesome magic three software vendors listed above?
No, I limited it to them only because those three companies can flood the
market with software that makes the decision by force majeur. I don't think
the domains you list have the market power on the desktop to be a
sufficient quorum.
Dotted domains were a bad idea in DNS to start with and giving a
perpetually renewing contract to Network Solutions to operate the best one
was sillier. We should embrace the opportunity
to throw a bad engineering decision into the dustbin of history not try
to take the side of the TLD operators whose rent seeking opportunities are
threatened by the inevitable transition
to a dotless scheme.
I can't wait for your draft suggesting a fix based on a DNS zone that
whitelists/blacklists those words that can be used dotless withou harm,
after using /etc/hosts through ansible fails to scale.
The community has only two choices that make sense, either embrace dotless
domains or deploy DNS rules that simply block all the new ICANN TLDs as
unnecessary rent seeking noise. I would actually prefer the second but I
don't think a 'just say no to new TLDs' is a viable proposition.
The proportion of the Internet user community that is aware of default
domain sufixes at all is very unlikely to be as much as 1%. So if we are
going to make a proper argument on the grounds of avoiding user confusion
we should probably be telling software providers to stop supporting the
local domain prefixes in platforms as a security risk. The default path on
this machine is probably verizon.net. I find the default domain suffix to
be sufficiently useless that I never bother to set it.
--
Website: http://hallambaker.com/