ICANN’s security and stability committee (SSAC) recently issued a report on “dotless” domain names.
These would be where the domain name is the extension – so instead of having $thing.$extension you would find $extension by itself.
As the report (PDF) explains, there are quite a few technical issues with the concept of no domain extension.
Just polling a few users on Twitter last night the responses were quite amusing, with people likening dotless domains to AOL’s keyword service from the 1990s. The confusion element was also mentioned:
@mneylon that’s like on ST:TNG – how does the computer know when the crew are talking *about* it and not *to* it?
— Stewart Curry (@irishstu) August 26, 2012
@mneylon @irishstu So stupid. Owner would still have to denote what it is in ads, .com does exactly that already.
— Rossa McMahon (@rossamcmahon) August 26, 2012
The report is open for comments until 23rd September
Related articles
- .Post Is In The Root (internetnews.me)
@mneylon If this takes off we should take revenge by only dealing in IP addresses. DNS is supposed to be a hierarchy to make things easier.
@mneylon PR peoples wet fantasies… I fully agree.. The nerds revenge will be change for Ipv6 addresses instead of domains…