Donald,
Why not? COM, EDU, ORG, and NET are not restricted to US entitites
and in fact have a number of non-US entities registered under them.
INT was specifically set up for international organization which seems
to me to make more sense than forcing the United Nations or the ITU
or the International Red Cross, etc., to register under some particular
country. Only GOV and MIL are US only.
While it is true that COM, EDU, ORG and NET are not US only, GOV and
MIL are and thus are US-centric. Also, use of these other top-level
domains promotes name conflicts by not including national (geographic)
qualifiers which could otherwise be avoided.
What's wrong with having choice and letting people decide if they
want to register under a country or not?
A major problem with providing top level domains which are not
countries is the increased likelihood of colissions, as noted above.
I don't understand why there should be conflicts. Whoever gets there
first wins. There are plenty of relatively short character strings
to go around. The mapping from longer names to shorter names can be
done in a variety of ways.
I can't agree that "whoever gets there first wins" is a viable policy
in this name registration contetx. Lost of people, companies, etc.
have perfectly legal rights to use names in a large context. Many
(most?) companies have registered their rights. The DNS does not
predate these other name registrations and thus registration in the
DNS does not imply a prior use of a name in the larger context. Thus,
there is a significant conclift potential between the larger world
context of name usage and the DNS context. Because of our fixation on
very short names, we have created a situation in which conflicts are
inevitable and in which legal remedy is not an unlikely result. Yes,
on can map between long, descriptive names and short names, but a goal
of certificates is top provide names which are descriptive and which
minimize the need to trust external, global mappings. Thus having a
short, descriptive name in a certificate is not appropriate, nor is it
that useful. A well engineered secure email user agent (PEM or
otherwise) would provide the user with a mapping from locally defines
aliases to certificates, preserving the user's ability to deal with
short names. In fact, the user can deal with names even shorted than
DNS names in such a context. True, this constitutes an external
mapping, but is purely a local one under the control of each user and
thus not subject to many of the attacks that might be effected against
a global mapping.
All of the problems with the delegation of naming authority relate to
delegation of "country" naming authority. Sound to me like an
argument for sticking with at least the option of non-country naming.
Well, it's true that many of the problems we see in the DNS today have
to do with who is responsible for what country, but that is just the
tip of the iceberg, I fear. If millions of companies try to register
under .COM, on a global basis, the name conflicts would be substantail
and the lawyers would have a field day. I'd like to avoid that.
Happily, some entities are registering under top level country codes
and mitigating this problem.
Steve