We believe there is a great need for a domain space for people, not corporates,
where people could have their personal address on the growing web, for email and
web-pages today, tomorrow - their mobile telephone number and personal IP-number
would perhaps resolve from this domain name.The DNS system takes part of its greatness
from the fact that it is a global, unique addressing system. Every URL is unique
and resolves in same way independently of context or country.
However, this is
not the case for people's names, as rightly pointed out, some names are so common
that even the firstname-lastname combination is shared by thousands, and would not
be of the unique nature of the DNS.
(There are only in the US 2,742,000 people
with the lastname "Smith", and 4,320,000 with the firstname "John". Of these, about
40,000 share the most common combination of "western names", "John Smith")
One
way of solving the problem, which has been suggested before by several email providers,
is to add a string to the name in order to make it unique, like a unique number,
combinations of the individual's country, city, birthdate, social security number,
etc. Such constructions have not been a great success.
This would typically result
in addresses of the type:
john@Smith.05116599.name
john@Smith.33.Minnesota.US.name
Kim@Li.0655562222.Bejing.CN.name
Many
people would find it quite uninteresting to have such an address, after all, how
would that make the address easier to remember and to relate to?
We believe that
there exist a multitude of mechanisms to partially or completely solve the problem
of colliding names, but have only proposed one - allowing registrations on the third
level only.
A third level registration policy would for "Smith.name" give the opportunity
to have a Smith.name address to all the 2,742,000 Smiths in the US, (and the 807
in Spain, as an example), instead of only to one. After this, we would like to leave
it to each individual how they would like to customize their address in order to
obtain their preferred combination.
Such combinations could be, but would not
be limited to:
- www.lastname.firstname.name (many cultures use this sorting method,
i.e. in Eastern Europe and Asia)
- www.firstnameXXX.lastname.name (where XXX is
any number or string of any length of the user's preference)
- www.firstname.lastname.profession.name
(if, as pointed out, users would like to have their profession included in their
personal address)
-www.firstname.lastname.countrycode.name (another possibility
open for all)
The fact that we limit registrations to the third level allow far
more flexibility and choice for the end users than giving away the second level domain
name. While it is not a full solution, we believe it's better to give users the choice,
and thereby not limiting possibilities we do not currently see.
The uniqueness
of the DNS and the commonness of certain names are difficult to combine and we must
look at diversity to manage it.
For mediumly common names, though, like Mathew
Hankins, the problem is far smaller. There are 24538 Hankins in the US, and 84480
Mathews, of which about 700 are named "Mathew Hankins". Mathews chance of having
a domain name just multiplied by 35 as a result of third level registrations, while
keeping an interesting address (more interesting than www.Mathews.Hankins.6599232.US.name),
and allowing for flexibility.
All the thousands of different Hankins would have
a chance of a unique address, and most would find their own ways around collisions.
From our knowledge gained through running a personal domain name service for more
than 800,000 people using a firstname@lastname.com (or other TLD), we have understood
that people manage to coexist in the space although they share the same Firstname-Lastname
combination, as long as the second level is not reserved the sole usage of one.
It
is our belief that leaving the necessary choice to the end users is the best way
of giving the most people possible a space on a new top level domain, .name, should
it be created. We will actively seek to provide a space that is as large as possible
and work towards the goal of a .name for everyone.
Yours truly,
Hakon Haugnes
The
Global Name Registry