IFWP Working Group K Miller Internet-Draft 25 Feb 1999 A Zero-level Domain ------------------------ Status of this document: "This document is an Internet-Draft. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts." (Ref: http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/draft-ietf-html-charset- harmful-00.txt ; also http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec/charset- harmful.html) Distribution of this document is unlimited. Please send comments to [EMAIL PROTECTED] , preserving the subject line as principal reference. Discussions of the group are archived at news://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IFWP.General . ------------------------------ Abstract: According to the draft guidelines, 5 'equal' registrars will work with the NSI "." file for six months, presumably to see how it goes before opening up to the whole gamut to whoever wants to play. It is an opportune moment to consider the creation of a 'zeroth' domain name server, based on ISO 'code-pages.' That is, a 3LD.2LD.1LD address would no longer be 'fully' specified, but simply the reduced 3LD.2LD.1LD.0LD, defaulted to .8859-1 . Any question of monopoly or hegemony is then removed from NSI (there are 11 presently identified codes), a broad base of qualified candidates is available to operate the 0LD registry (under contract to ISO, say), and only the intuitively obvious stipulation that nationally registered trademarks run only in the national language need be accepted by national courts. Specification of a 0LD SHOULD refer solely to the domain address (in its entirety), not to the traffic routed by it. ------------------------ Terminology Rat hole An area where there is much controversy, and which should therefore be avoided in standards. Broken Standard or part of a standard which cannot work because of technical problems or disagreement between different parts of the standard. Coded Character Sets "Using 'character set' rather than something such as 'character table' or even 'character sequence' to denote the functions that map to characters is unfortunate, but it is water under the bridge, and a lot of it by now. Rather than attempting to divert all that water at this point, we introduce the primitive notion of character and use it to define the term 'coded character set' from ISO10646 and other standards: "character An atom of information "coded character set A function whose domain is a subset of the integers, and whose range is a set of characters. [...] "character repertoire A set of characters; that is, the range of a coded character set. "Note that by the term character, we do not mean a glyph, a name, a phoneme, nor a bit combination [octet]. A character is simply an atomic unit of communication. It is typically a symbol whose various representations are understood to mean the same thing by a community of people." (ibid.) The namebase 'top-level domain' (TLD) is referred to here as the first-level domain (1LD) for the sake of clarity. --------------------- The Argument: Some proposals make little or no use of such conventional mathematical terms as function, domain and range, but the conformance of a unique 'domain address' and (one or more) trademarks, for instance, is much more complex than the basics of logic and mathematics. Without beginning at the beginning, any specification of such a notion will only add to the confusion as its internal inconsistencies come to light, most probably through litigation in courts ill-equipped to address them. To ease the mental effort of recalling IP numbers, they were aliased by names. To ease the effort of maintaining distributed namebases, a central registry was maintained. To relieve USG of the burden of the day-to-day nitty gritty of updating the registry, a contract was given to Network Solutions, Inc. To make a reasonable return on their investment, NSI was permitted to charge yearly fees on registered names. To ameliorate its de facto if not de jure monopoly practice, the role of registrar is to be distributed among several others, who will soon form a de facto cartel. All this complicates Internet administration immeasurably, in spite of the fact that reliance on mortal memory is steadily diminishing. Clipboards, address bookmarks, search engines and hypertext all make it practical to substitute electronics for little grey cells. In addition, the marketing of namespace begun by NSI has generated a market in names themselves. Not only has the namebase been used as a 'phone book' for people attracted to particular names, but it conflicts with the existing body of law regarding names in trade which developed from entirely different premises and which might legitimately be said to have precedence. In short, the namespace 'standard' has been broken, and from a number of perspectives it is a rat hole. For Internet administration, the task is to preserve the utility of namespace while removing it from both market vagaries and a centralized monopolistic authority. This RFC addresses the issue by removing the implicit monopoly of Latin-1 from the namespace and thus the scarcity-value from any given address. For the majority of users, whose first language (for now) is English, nothing appears to change. The '.com' domain for instance remains as functional as ever, with all its charming ambiguities and opportunities for 'free speech.' For many others, especially those whose principal 1LD is a 'country-code,' the way is clear to register a domain name in their native language without fear of embroiling themselves in a case of 'infringement' in another country with unfamiliar laws, and to realize that the development of 'localized' networked-computer applications need not be limited by one's fluency in English. However, as the net truly internationalizes, the foremost benefit is that there will be increasing opportunity for all to see and use addresses which are not 'human-readable,' to accept that a '.com' can in fact be distinguished from a '.net' or a '.org' whether in their own language or any of several others, and generally to recognize that the pointer to a site says as little about the contents of the site as a person's name says about his or her personality. Names, after all, have considerably greater precedence in human experience than trademark law. Even if firms are still struggling with the idea that "the map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing," as the semanticist Alfred Lord Korzybski wrote 60 years ago, ordinary people have long since come to 'terms' with it. To (re)capture our native human comprehensibility in order to apply it to computerdom does not take it out of 'sensible space'; on the contrary, it reasserts and reinvigorates this fundamental public domain. ----------------------- Considerations: 1. The fact that the contents of the namebase are not merely numbers, but include personal information such as addresses and phone numbers, is outside the scope of this RFC. It does however call into question the concept of intellectual property on which much of the current reasoning (and rhetoric) relies. 2. The existence of multiple 1LD registrars for existing registries is likewise immaterial, although the implict approval of ICANN for continuing the hegemony of a single legacy language (ASCII) may become relevant if its authority is ever contested. 3. Multiple 1LDs already exist in the 'root zone,' which is also adminstered by NSI "until such time as the USG instructs NSI in writing to transfer either or both of these functions to NewCo or a specified alternate entity [or as] directed by NewCo when submitted to NSI in conformity with written procedures established by NewCo and recognized by the USG." (Ref: http://rs.internic.net/nsf/agreement/amendment11.html). As many of these 1LDs are 'country-code' domains which operate as quasi-governmental entities (i.e. on a par with NSI), it is safe to assume that all 0LDs will be rapidly populated by interested and committed parties. -------------------------- References: [ASCII] US-ASCII. Coded Character Set - 7-Bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Standard ANSI X3.4-1986, ANSI, 1986. [ISO-8859] ISO 8859. International Standard -- Information Processing -- 8-bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets -- Part 1: Latin Alphabet No. 1, ISO 8859-1:1987. Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2, ISO 8859-2, 1987. Part 3: Latin alphabet No. 3, ISO 8859-3, 1988. Part 4: Latin alphabet No. 4, ISO 8859-4, 1988. Part 5: Latin/Cyrillic alphabet, ISO 8859-5, 1988. Part 6: Latin/Arabic alphabet, ISO 8859-6, 1987. Part 7: Latin/Greek alphabet, ISO 8859-7, 1987. Part 8: Latin/Hebrew alphabet, ISO 8859-8, 1988. Part 9: Latin alphabet No. 5, ISO 8859-9, 1990.
