The Worldwide Domain Battle

pledibus writes "The New York Times's Sunday magazine contains an interesting article, Get Out of My Namespace, about the spate of conflicts over website names. The author synthesizes ideas from computer technology, law, history, onomastics, cultural anthropology, and probably a few other areas, and does a pretty nice job of it."

Reg Free Link

[Anonymous Coward]

Reg Free link [nytimes.com]

Link

[pjt33]

Courtesy of Google News [goupstate.com], no subscription required.

Bleh

[Spazzz]

I wish the lameness would stop. The WIPO has proven themselves to be about as ineffective and "unbiased" as ICANN. Does anybody remember if there was a trademark war between the makers of the VAX [vax.co.uk] and the VAX [vaxarchive.org]? Apple Records and Apple Computers have been able to coexist peacefully since the late 70s, as well.

I can see the WIPO and lawyers going after domain squatters who are attempting to profit from another company or individual's fame or reputation, but the disputes nowadays are insane, and take away from the value of the Internet as a whole.

OTOH, maybe I should sue the people that own workman.org [workman.org] Since I have probably been around much longer than this site, plus, people might go to this site, thinking that it is my own, and get the wrong impression that I'm a Christian!

-J (Trying to call his lawyer on a Sunday)

Having read the entire article,

[way2trivial]

I'm amazed that they missed Nissan.com

this guy fought a hell of a battle with Nissan motors, and I think he should have outright won, and the final decision was- he may not use his domain for commercial purposes.. what kind of stupid ruling was/is that? if it's his, (and it should be) then he should be able to use it for ANYTHING that does not have to do with NISSAN or cars.

(which he never did....)

Re:To me...

[Anonymous Coward]

They're also playing on phase lags: if you are a small company and you blink, a squatter snatches up your domain name. If you're a big company, Verisign and their ilk will sit on the namespace for a while to give you extra chances to register it. So the rules about keeping a domain registered are unevenly applied. Also, they're poorly handled in terms of fraudulent registrants, such as spammers who provide fake names and squatters who lie about what business they're part of when they register the namespace.

So yes, you can blame Verisign for some of it.

Good article, but has a couple of myths in it

[eggboard]

Gleick knows his technology, but he's spreading a couple of myths in the middle of a really interesting discussion on namespace and trademarks.

"...a computer that happens to be situated in Reston, Va. -- a computer known as the primary root server or, less affectionately, the Black Box..."

Paul Vixie posted this message [interesting-people.org] on the IP list a few months ago to dispute that. There are many root nameservers, not just Network Solutions'.

"The mapping of a domain name to a particular address can be changed in a matter of moments; the necessary instructions propagate automatically across the network..."

Actually, the root nameservers communicate their mappings to each other for start of authority (SOA), but they don't propagate address changes.

I've had to explain this to many, many fellow reporters. DNS is a retrieve and cache on demand system. Browser says: what's slashdot.org? Resolver climbs the chain of authority and back down, retrieves the address information, provides it to the browser, and caches it locally for a period of time (or not, depending on the OS).

The next query after the cache expires retrieves fresh information. Updates to DNS records don't propagate: they only take affect on the next query after no cached information is found.

Re:Bleh

[pjt33]

Apple Records and Apple Computers have been able to coexist peacefully since the late 70s, as well.

Apart from two lawsuits [forbes.com].

Re:Brand Name War.... Taken to the Net

[mrfrostee]

The first-come first-server free for all messy domain registration system does not bode well for making the internet any less complicated.

Maybe the time has come to replace it with something better. The current Domain Name Registration, DNS, and PKI architecture all rely on some trusted central authority. It is possible to design a new distributed mechanism for these services that does not require trust, and is therefore less likely to be abused:

http://www.waterken.com/dev/YURL

See especially "Why use YURLS?":
http://www.waterken.com/dev/YURL/Why

EDITORS: POST GOOGLE NEWS LINKS

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it seem like you guys purposely put registration required links?

Its not at all difficult to go onto Google News and get a Partners link to NYTimes, yet you seem like you want to make it harder for us readers (i.e. those of us who may be considering a subscription to Slashdot) to read the articles. It also seems hypocritical because you all claim to support privacy but you keep on giving us these registration required links when you could easily have given a link without the registration page.

Re:Good article, but has a couple of myths in it

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many root servers, but there is only one primary database of domain data. It is in Reston. All root servers get their information from Reston.

Domains are mapped to nameservers in their domain record, not in DNS queries. This data is in the root servers (for the TLD, not for '.'), and changes do, in fact, propagate out to the other root servers when they ask the master for updates.

DNS data itself can be seen to propagate out, when you include the concept of TTL (time-to-live) for the data. You don't always query authoritative nameservers for an address -- it would overload them (and where would you stop? you'd have to go all the way up to the root servers to be sure you were getting good info). You ask your local cacheing nameserver, run by your ISP, who checks its cache to see if it already "knows" the answer, and whether the answer is "older" than its TTL. If it is older, it usually queries the authoritative nameserver for the domain. If it is younger, it just returns the same value as before.

So the data doesn't propagate per se, but the awareness of it does, and not instantly. Sometimes not even quickly.

And yes, your browser caches the response too, but that has nothing to do with DNS or TTL.

Trademark Troubles for Open Source Projects

[wehe]

Besides domain name conflicts, there are many trademark conflicts, too. I have collected a list of trademark cases related to Open Source projects [tuxmobil.org]. Currently there are 18 cases known. But there are more, which are not made known public.

Re:Reg Free Link

[ed333]

Is it just me, or did the article say

the two spectacular naming triumphs of the cyberworld are coinages verging on nonsense: YAHOO! (never omit the exclamation point) and GOOGLE.

According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org],

The word "Google" is a play on the word 'googol', which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web.

Doesn't sound nonsensical to me.