Bob "Connectivity" Frankston has posted a great essay about the real-world ambiguity that ICANN is trying to shove into neat pigeonholes with its .COM and other DNS schemes:
The mindless literalness of computing devices forces us to be explicit about these distinctions. Yet we still manage to miss the point and ignore the obvious message. Perhaps it is no different from the 1950's when mother's thought everything their babies touched had to be sterilized except for the 90% of the day when they are crawling around and putting everything in their mouths. That 90% of the day was simply invisible.
Perhaps this explains the ".com" mania. We tend to assume that because we can guess the name of some very popular sites that the naming scheme works and makes sense. We gloss over the many serious and fatal flaws in such names as if they were the exceptions rather than the rule. What I find most disappointing is that even those technical adapt and aware of the details of the DNS implementation manage to sustain this dissonance….
The DNS was created to meet a need. The IP address is not a stable handle. Instead we use the DNS name as the stable handle. The Internet was a small community and, as in the medieval village, we could talk about the miller without making a distinction between the profession and the surname. The tax collector had to be able to identify the person and thus treated the name as an abstract identifier rather than a description.
In today's world we can't simply tell people to ignore the meaning of the words used in .COM names even though they make the DNS meaningless since names can't be stable and track changes in meaning. Instead we must understand the concepts of naming and binding and create an abstract handle that can be the stable identifier. After all, isn't the purpose of the DNS to provide some stable bindings?
(via SATN)
