[amelius]

The internet's implementation of name resolving is wrong.

If you type "apple.com" you should get a disambiguation page saying "Did you mean the grocery store, the record company, or the computer company?" and from there you can reach the desired website. Somewhat like how it works in Wikipedia.

Unlike land, names are not a scarcity and can be shared. So why pretend they are like land?

[JoshTriplett]

> names are not a scarcity and can be shared

Domain names cannot be effectively shared between non-cooperating entities. Someone has to own the DNS A/AAAA/CNAME/etc records, and be able to change them at will. They have to point to someone's server. It doesn't matter what technological implementation underpins name resolution, it's a fundamentally important property that it must be possible to have exclusive ownership of a domain name.

If I'm trying to reach my bank, I need to know that I'm talking to my bank, and we have a whole technological stack designed to ensure that, including cryptographic authentication and public logs (Certificate Transparency) to make sure nobody can secretly tamper with that authentication.

Any system that cannot provide such authentication is not a viable naming scheme.

There's a long-standing concept that has been discussed many times that naming could be based entirely on that cryptographic authentication, without having any kind of "human-readable" name at all. However, such a system would not solve the full problem that needs solving; it would just mean there would then need to be a separate directory system to help people find the server they actually want and then talk securely to that server.

[bootloop]

.com is shared, and .apple.com can be shared across multiple subdomains in the same way. We already have that eg. co, gov etc. The registrar would have to maintain the link lists and host them on apple.com for you to choose. You would get a subdomain which you can manage.

[JoshTriplett]

com isn't "shared"; it points exclusively to the .com registrar, who determine the ownership of names under .com.

It would certainly be possible to treat "apple.com" the same way, but then, who decides who gets "records.apple.com" and who gets "computer.apple.com"? Does "records.apple.com" go to Apple Records, the music label, or to Apple Records, a hypothetical bookkeeping ("record-keeping") company, as one of many possible conflicts?

[scubbo]

This is a very interesting statement. My gut reaction is "no, that's wrong!", but I can't quite articulate _why_ that's wrong - so, please consider this reply in the spirit of an auto-Socratic dialogue, rather than an argument intended to dissuade you.

You're right that names themselves are not truly scarce*, but "convenience of being referenced by a name on the internet" most certainly _is_ a scarce resource. There can only be one "first resolved entity" - this is why companies invest in SEO**. So it seems like what you're actually arguing for (and apologies if I'm misrepresenting you here!) is a situation where it's not possible for the average internet consumer to directly reference a particular domain, but rather where all name-resolution queries _have to_ go through a hypothetical unbiased "top-level" search engine - one which indexes not documents, but domains. Is that right?

If that's the case, then we've then opened up several other problems: - who decides the order in which those results get displayed? You may not think it matters, but I can promise you that NEO ("Name Engine Optimization") would then become a lucrative industry. Apple-the-computer-company certainly wouldn't stand for being the third result for apple.com - how do direct links and bookmarks work? - If there's some sub-identifier ("apple.computer.com" resolves directly), then who assigns those sub-identifiers? If ICAAN or a similar organization, then we're right back at the current situation, but one level deeper - the IT company for the Apple grocery store would be fighting (with their wallet) against the Apple Computer company. - If direct links only work via IP addresses, well, the average consumer wouldn't be delighted with that; nor would print advertisers trying to share a human-memorable address

It's a tempting idea, for certain, but I can't see a way of implementing this that doesn't immediately give rise to the same problems one layer deeper. You've clearly thought about this more than I have, though, so I look forward to hearing more about it!

* though to an extent, they are; since there can not practically be multiple items of a given name within a category - if every man was named John, then we would need some other way to distinguish them, and so "John<-identifier>" would _become_ their name

** where, here, the "name" is a search term rather than a specific one-to-one address - and, yes, I recognize that that's not _quite_ the same thing

[scubbo]

Ugh, I apparently can't edit this to reformat. Apologies - the `-`s in the paragraph beginning "If that's the case" were, clearly, meant to be bullets or sub-bullets.

[throwaway3699]

Land can be shared just like names, and the reality is there's only so many disambiguations one can learn. Even with that ability, consumers are only going to remember one apple.com.

[nightfly]

I kind of like the new world of more TLDs to solve this. I really wish they weren't privately owned though.

apple.grocery apple.song/radio/fm apple.computer

[3np]

I think what you're looking for is a search engine.

[mitchdoogle]

Isn't that kind of the function of search engines?