Name that site

Several years ago I was having a late night whiskey session with a friend in advertising. He was working on a campaign for a milkshake product, and had come up with a brilliant idea: to register the domain www.com. So you'd have www.www.com. Which, if you flip it over and take the mirror image, says “mmmmmm cow”.

It was an awful idea. Thankfully, it melted away along with the contents of the ice bucket, well before the evening was over.

I was reminded of this foray into domain name madness when I saw an announcement from zaDNA (the .za Domain Name Authority), that it was looking at the possibility of a consultative process to evaluate the options for alternative domain name policies at some point in the indeterminate future. The gist of what they were saying is that we have lots and lots of domains registered under co.za, and maybe it's time to open some more second-level domains, like city-specific names.

www.dirkiesguesthouse.putsonderwater.za certainly has a ring to it.

Reaction within the Internet industry amounted to little more than discrete eye-rolling. Many still have memories of the last major consultative process by zaDNA in 2005, which resulted in not an awful lot of anything.

Since the announcement from zaDNA at the beginning of September, things have gone quiet again. There's nothing on its Web site, and no other announcements have been forthcoming. So, until some kind of process starts, I want to throw an idea on the plate and see if anyone throws mayonnaise on it.

Here goes: Forget about the whole hierarchy of second-level domain names. It's an artificial, anachronistic construction that serves no useful purpose. IP addresses are hierarchical for a good engineering reason - second-level domain naming schemes, not so much. Arguably, having domain names break down according to a hierarchy should make sense in terms of faster lookups, but the global Interwebs are now made up of such a mishmash of naming schemes that any kind of nice, ordered system has fallen by the wayside already. Can you give any good reason for choosing a .ws domain? Anyone seen anyone use a .co.us domain recently? No - probably because it should, in theory, be a domain relating to Colorado, USA.

The domain name hierarchy below TLDs around the world is at best chaotic, at worst downright nonsensical. The concept of a .co.za site being by definition a “commercial organisation in South Africa” has no useful relation to reality.

So, what would a free-for-all look like? Pretty good.

I'd be first in line to register spa.za, ga.za and tollpla.za.

Roger Hislop, ITWeb contributor

France (more recently) and Germany (since forever) let you register your chosen domain at the second level. The French can have Free.fr. Orange.fr. IBM.fr. Ski.fr. The Germans can have adidas.de, spiegel.de or ktmteamwest.de. If you want, you can do URL plays, like freu.de (game site), or even mer.de (parked, unfortunately).

Obviously, we should keep the existing second-level domains for backwards compatibility and some level of consistency. I still like .org.za addresses for the warm sense of establishment respectability - you know that if you visit animalaid.org.za, you'll find something legit and caring. Generally. So keep existing .co.za addresses, keep .gov.za, maybe keep a few others. Maybe even resurrect a couple of the old private domains from days of yore, like olivetti.za, or pix.za just to make a point.

Then open the doors - with plenty of advance notice of course, to existing domain name owners (especially those based on registered trademarks), and with some kind of functioning sanity check to keep out the worst of the squatting (unlike the so-called Dispute Resolution 'process').

Then let the market do what it wants to do - register coke.za, or news.za or dirkiesguesthouse.za. Before long, Australians will be queuing up three deep to register baz.za, shaz.za and gaz.za.

And why not? I'd be first in line to register spa.za, ga.za and tollpla.za, and hope to sell them years later to some sucker for millions... well, maybe hundreds.

Nowadays, we can assume that a domain name is a unique identifier for a brand - no more, no less, and no further conclusions can be drawn from it. The only remaining namespace challenge in the modern Internet lies in who gets to claim a domain name as theirs - so, how about zaDNA spends more time thinking about that, and less time fiddling with useless hierarchies?

Let's forget about the absurd and useless urge to impose even more unnecessary order and bureaucracy on South African domain names. You can't shut the stable door - the horse of neat and orderly domain name systems bolted years ago. We may as well just run with it.