Web hosting New Top Level Domains .mobi and

In 2004 there were proposals to create new top-level domains which included .mobi and .xxx. There are major problems with these proposals. There are costs in general to creating any new top level domain. There are specific ways in which the ".mobi" breaks the Web architecture of links, and attacks the universality of the Web.

At their 14 May 2004 face-to-face meeting, the W3C Technical Architecture Group resolved to support this document, with Norman Walsh abstaining, and Paul Cotton recusing himself.

Introduction

When the Internet was being collaboratively developed by a substantially technical community around a growing but still manageable Internet Engineering Task Force, the Domain Name System (DNS) evolved as a hierarchical solution to the problem of keeping track of which computers had which Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. The tree structure was an improvement over the previous flat space of host names. It reduced the chaos, by allowing new names to be allocated in sub-domains without recourse to a central registration system. Because the frequency of allocation of new names decreased as one ascended the tree toward the root, the actual cost was kept manageable.

As email and World Wide Web (WWW) use blossomed and became increasingly important, domain names crept out of the messages syntax for Internet protocols and crept into daily parlance. It then became valuable to own a short domain name. This turned domain name space into a limited commodity. After some tussles for control (ongoing at the time of writing) and some large amounts of money changing hands in some cases, the system has now settled down to a market-based one in which names can be rented, transfer value can be asked by the old owner of the new owner, and one-time and annual fees are typically payable by any domain to any company managing the higher domain. An anomaly was that unclaimed names were deemed to have no owner and no value, and were allocated in a "first come first served" frenzy in which speculators made great profits and held to ransom those who may have been considered the more logical owner of a name. This anomaly created great instability. It has costs, in that any trademark owner had to beware of parties who would register domains which included their trademark. The Example Manufacturing Company had to ensure that it owned not only example.com which it had used for email and Web site for many years, but also example.net and example.org to avoid unscrupulous competition setting up sites to benefit from Example's excellent reputation. As the business grew, Example had to also acquire example.fr and example.co.uk to ensure that confusion was minimized.

The fact was that the public memory was not for the domain name, but for the brand name which was sandwiched between www and .com. To this extent, in the world of memorable domain names, the hierarchicalization of the domain system had failed to happen. In the public's memory, example was the mark, and the difference between example.com and example.net merely a source of confusion.

As each node in the tree represents a potentially valuable asset, control of any subset of the tree is valuable. Control of the entire tree is managed by ICANN, which is set up to be a non-profit international institution, with the intent that it should as such carry the trust of the entire community in its efforts to manage the system for the common good. Control of subtrees such as .net, .com and .org is delegated to set of parallel registries whose business model is nominally the charging of registration and annual fees. There have been temptations for the registry companies to consider themselves owners of unclaimed names. Rumors have abounded about systems which would automatically rent a domain name about which a potential renter was inquiring, or would redirect traffic from an unclaimed Web site to their own Web site, and so on.//