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This is quite an interesting experiment, and a step in the good direction, which should and must lead us to the complete removal of domain names. Why are domai

by gbog 13y ago

This is quite an interesting experiment, and a step in the good direction, which should and must lead us to the complete removal of domain names. Why are domain names bad? That should be obvious. The main symptom of domain names' inherent brokenness is that the law must patch it so that an unknown squatter cannot kidnap some domain, e.g. register "france.com" and ransom it to the people who are most qualified to claim it. This is ridiculous: the squatter should not have had the opportunity to squat this (I know it doesn't apply for "France" but it applies for many other names). Nowhere in the world we see kids grab the seat in front of the fireplace and not let their grandma have it. Moreover, what if a single ascii string refers to two different things equally claimable by two groups of people? E.g. what about "francfort.com"? Which city would it refer to? A contrieved case: If Chinese people chose a translitteration scheme for their language so that "google" would mean China, wouldn't they have some rights over google.com? This level of brokenness is not even because of a leaky abstraction, this is a sunken boat everyone has to use to cross the river. On a more philosophical stance, domain names are wrong because they build a kind of universal language out of nowhere, grounded on nothing, whitout any kind of democratic digestion and acceptance by human beings. We could have a universal language shared by all humans, but it would be a very long process of slow acceptance, with a percolation through all societies all over the world. In this way, there would be many adjustments, reverts, and eventually we would come up with a set of names that is good enough, but right now domain names are just a musical chairs game that is ridiculous and must be stopped. So I think using a string's hash is a nice step, because it starts blurring the domain name. However, I think a much better scheme should be to use the hash of the page content as the domain name. In this case, once the hash is determined, who cares where it is, who care which domain it has? It would just be way to download the content. And the job of search engines would be to point us to these hashes. And dynamic content you tell? Which dynamic content? Does one really care about changes in wiki pages? And for the twitter feed, each tweek is a fixed content snippet, and the javascript fetching them is also fixed, or could be a browser extension. And an up-to-date search engine would have the latest hash for a keyword such as "twitter" or "The Guradian". A nice side-effect would be that domain name based censorship would become ineffective. And downloading content could be just some p2p checkouts.

MichaelGG 13y ago
How does this solve anything? Instead of registering france.com, I'll register the hash of "France". Adding a level of indirection hasn't provided any benefits. People can already register domains like "food-in-chicago.com" or "for-sale-baby-clothes.com". Your contrived example about "Google" meaning "China" in Chinese, is irrelevant. The .CN registrar can enforce whatever rules they want. The US .COM registrar can have its own rules. There's no issue there.
- gbog 13y ago
  The problem is that .COM is de facto the universal entry point.
  - lmm 13y ago
    De jure too, isn't it? .us exists for US-specific content; .com ought to be reserved for international sites.
    - tjgq 13y ago
      They ought, but aren't. Unfortunately, .com and most (all?) of the other non-national TLDs are under US jurisdiction.
  - tjgq 13y ago
    Is it, though? I get the impression that people at large don't even care about domain names anymore, let alone whether they end in .com or something else. In fact, most non-technical users I know go to the sites they visit daily by clicking the first result of the corresponding Google search.
vidyesh 13y ago
The concept just covers hash-n-slash but you also touched a very different concept of p2p content delivery. But talking about hash-n-slash why it is bad. Just like domains have the issue of being kidnapped so would be the keywords. For example with the hash-n-slash you would never know where you will end up being when you search for "france". By giving search engine the liberty to direct me to a site I lose the ability to manually choose france.com when some SEO guy has made sure that #://france would lead of francegiggly.com Same goes with every other keyword, we already have a keyword battle on search engines and it would be better limiting that battle to search engines only. If we push that to browser itself it would be just be chaotic and misleading to people who don't really understand domain authority. Imagine this being done for pushing phishing website when trying to go to your bank's login page. I get it most bookmark it but many don't and new account holders? Its just a proof of concept and in reality it has many constraints, the search engine and domain world isn't that broken yet that we need an alternate solution. As much as its difficult to get relevant domain names its still not impossible to settle for something similar to what you wanted.

by gbog 13y ago

MichaelGG 13y ago

How does this solve anything? Instead of registering france.com, I'll register the hash of "France". Adding a level of indirection hasn't provided any benefits. People can already register domains like "food-in-chicago.com" or "for-sale-baby-clothes.com". Your contrived example about "Google" meaning "China" in Chinese, is irrelevant. The .CN registrar can enforce whatever rules they want. The US .COM registrar can have its own rules. There's no issue there.

gbog 13y ago
The problem is that .COM is de facto the universal entry point.
- lmm 13y ago
  De jure too, isn't it? .us exists for US-specific content; .com ought to be reserved for international sites.
  - tjgq 13y ago
    They ought, but aren't. Unfortunately, .com and most (all?) of the other non-national TLDs are under US jurisdiction.
- tjgq 13y ago
  Is it, though? I get the impression that people at large don't even care about domain names anymore, let alone whether they end in .com or something else. In fact, most non-technical users I know go to the sites they visit daily by clicking the first result of the corresponding Google search.

vidyesh 13y ago

The concept just covers hash-n-slash but you also touched a very different concept of p2p content delivery. But talking about hash-n-slash why it is bad. Just like domains have the issue of being kidnapped so would be the keywords. For example with the hash-n-slash you would never know where you will end up being when you search for "france". By giving search engine the liberty to direct me to a site I lose the ability to manually choose france.com when some SEO guy has made sure that #://france would lead of francegiggly.com Same goes with every other keyword, we already have a keyword battle on search engines and it would be better limiting that battle to search engines only. If we push that to browser itself it would be just be chaotic and misleading to people who don't really understand domain authority. Imagine this being done for pushing phishing website when trying to go to your bank's login page. I get it most bookmark it but many don't and new account holders? Its just a proof of concept and in reality it has many constraints, the search engine and domain world isn't that broken yet that we need an alternate solution. As much as its difficult to get relevant domain names its still not impossible to settle for something similar to what you wanted.