Re: unqualified domains, was ICANN to allow commercial gTLDs

[Matthew Palmer <mpalmer () hezmatt org>]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 02:08:18AM +0000, Paul Vixie wrote:
> > From: David Conrad <drc () virtualized org>
> > Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2011 16:04:09 -1000
> >
> > On Jun 19, 2011, at 3:24 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:
> >
> > > i think we have to just discourage lookups of single-token names,
> > > universally.
> >
> > How?
>
> that's a good question.  marka mentioned writing an RFC, but i expect
> that ICANN could also have an impact on this by having applicants sign
> something that says "i know that my single-label top level domain name
> will not be directly usable the way normal domain names are and i intend
> to use it only to register subdomain names which will work normally."

Whilst we can dream that that will work, I don't think it'll actually last
very long in the face of determined marketing department pressure; also,
unless that agreement also says "I agree to pay the additional costs borne
by any party on the Internet that result from my failure to adhere to this
agreement", it's worthless.  Are your customers going to call Sony when they
put http://sony/ into their web browser and it doesn't work?  Hell no. 
They're going to call your helpdesk, and it's going to tie up a non-trivial
amount of engineer time either renaming things or reconfiguring the client
machine to make that URL work as the user expects it to.

- Matt

-- 
It fsck's the volume or it gets the format again.
                -- Don Quixote, in the Monastery