The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) made an announcement recently that inspired feelings of deja vu all over again. For those of you who may have missed it, the Internet firm received 10 applications for new sponsored top-level domains--you know, more "dot-something" suffixes. Providing just the kind of openness one hopes to see from such an important organization, ICANN included the proposed strings, sponsors, and sponsors' Web addresses in its press release. This way, interested parties can go check out the sponsors before telling ICANN what they think; the public comment period is open all April.
Now I don't know what kinds of comments ICANN is expecting, but I hope that whatever's conveying the comments to them is flame-resistant. Why do I say that? Let me just put on my curmudgeon's cap, climb aboard my Internet time machine, and I'll show you.
First, let's go back to the 1980s, when the World Wide Web was getting started. Back then, if you don't count the domains that were tied to a particular country (like ".us" for the United States), there were only seven top-level domains: the well-known .com, .net, and .org, and the somewhat less well-known .edu, .gov, .int, and .mil. They weren't sponsored, like the 10 that have just been proposed, but everyone pretty much knew what they were for: .edu for educational institutions, .org for not-for-profits, .gov for government, .int for international (for instance, the World Intellectual Property Organization uses that suffix), .net for large networks, .mil for military, and .com for...well, supposedly for "commercial," but really just for everything that didn't fit under the other domains. These set meanings have blurred and diluted over time--especially since nobody seems to be checking whether users of ".org" are really not-for-profits or ".net" are really large networks--but that was where it sat.
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