[NEC] 1.2 - Domain Names: Memorable, Global, Non-political?

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NEC @ Shirky.com, a mailing list about Networks, Economics, and Culture 

           Published periodically / # 1.2 / May 6, 2002 
              Subscribe at http://shirky.com/nec.html

In this issue:

 - Introduction
 - Essay: Domain Names -- Memorable, Global, Non-political?
   (Also at http://www.shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html)
 - Things worth reading
 - Questions I'm asking myself

* Introduction ======================================================

One interesting result of publishing "Communities, Audiences and
Scale" last month was the effect on traffic to shirky.com.  In April,
nearly 400 different sites, mostly weblogs, referred viewers to the
article. Of these 400, the top 10 sites accounted for over 50% of the
traffic, and the top 3 sites -- kottke.org, tomalak.org, and
camworld.com -- accounted for nearly 40% of the traffic. If less than
1% of referrers are producing ~40% of the traffic, power law
distributions are already settling into place in the weblog world.

There was also a thoughtful post on David Weinberger's JOHO site about
the nature of online community talking about the difference between
offline and online community.
[http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/archive/2002_04_01_archive.html#85004270]

The JOHO post points up the susceptibility of my original argument to
a dictionary attack. The word 'community' has more than a dozen
meanings, and it is difficult to talk about human clustering as
community without bringing in all the other conflicting definitions as
well. I am increasingly convinced that we are living in a golden age
of experimentation with social software, however, so finding
alternative terms of art for discussing human behavior on networks
seems a worthwhile project. I will just have to find less loaded words.

I also got this comment from Jeff Schneider:

  Going back to the original question, "Can we get the best of both
  worlds?  Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large
  audience but also allows all of the members of that audience to
  engage with one another like a single community?" I would consider
  restating the goal. Perhaps the goal isn't to draw an audience into
  a single community, but rather to right size the number of
  communities within the audience based on interests and desired
  participation levels.

I think this is exactly right. The problems that arise from merely
scaling up densely clustered models of community doesn't mean that
everything above a certain threshold has to be broadcast, it just
means we need to work to find ways of matching large size with dense
local clustering.  Everquest does it, Livejournal does it, Oprah's
book club did it, so there are a number of models for social software
out there worth examining.

This issue's essay is about the DNS and ICANN, and the problems we can
expect to beset any system that produces memorable and globally unique
names.

-clay
clay@shirky.com

* Essay =============================================================

Domain Names: Memorable, Global, Non-political?
[http://www.shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html]

Everyone understands that something happened to the domain name system
in the mid-90s to turn it into a political minefield, with domain name
squatters and trademark lawsuits and all the rest of it. It's tempting
to believe that if we could identify that something and reverse it, we
could return to the relatively placid days prior to ICANN.

Unfortunately, what made domain names contentious was simply that the
internet became important, and there's no putting the genie back in
that bottle. The legal issues involved actually predate not only ICANN
but the DNS itself, going back to the mid-70s and the earliest
decision to create memorable aliases for unmemorable IP addresses.
Once the original host name system was in place -- IBM.com instead of
129.42.18.99 -- the system was potentially subject to trademark
litigation. The legal issues were thus implicit in the DNS from the
day it launched; it just took a decade or so for anyone to care enough
to hire a lawyer.

There is no easy way to undo this. The fact that ICANN is a political
body is not their fault (though the _kind_ of political institution it
has become is their fault.) Memorable names create trademark issues.
Global namespace requires global oversight. Names that are both
memorable and globally unique will therefore require global political
oversight. As long as we want names we can remember, and which work
unambiguously anywhere in the world, someone somewhere will have to
handle the issues that ICANN currently handles.

- Safety in Numbers

One reaction to the inevitable legal trouble with memorable names is
simply to do away with memorable names. In this scenario, ICANN would
only be responsible for assigning handles, unique IDs devoid of any
real meaning.  (The most articulate of these proposals is Bob
Frankston's "Safe Haven" approach.)
[http://www.frankston.com/public/essays/DNSSafeHaven.asp]

In practice, this would mean giving a web site a meaningless but
unique numerical address. Like a domain name today, it would be
globally unambiguous, but unlike today's domain names, such an address
would not be memorable, as people are bad at remembering numbers, and
terrible at remembering long numbers.

Though this is a good way to produce URLs free from trademark, we
don't need a new domain to do this. Anyone can register unmemorable
numeric URLs today -- whois says 294753904578.com, for example, is
currently available. Since this is already possible, such a system
wouldn't free us from trademark issues, because whenever systems with
numerical addresses grow popular (e.g. Compuserve or ICQ), users
demand memorable aliases, to avoid dealing with horrible addresses
like 71234.5671@compuserve.com. Likewise, the DNS was designed to
manage memorable names, not merely unique handles, and creating a set
of non-memorable handles simply moves the issue of memorable names to
a different part of the system. It doesn't make the issue go away.

- Embrace Ambiguity

Another set of proposals would do away with globally unique aspect of
domain names. Instead of awarding a single firm the coveted .com
address, a search for ACME would yield several different matches,
which the user would then pick from. This is analogous to a Google
search on ACME, but one where none of the matches had a memorable
address of their own.

The ambiguity in such a system would make it impossible to automate
business-to-business connections using the names of the businesses
themselves. These addresses would also fail the 'side of the bus'
test, where a user seeing a simple address like IBM.com on a bus or a
business card (or hearing it over the phone or the radio) could go to
a browser and type it in. Instead, there would be a market for
third-parties who resolve name->address mappings.

The rise of peer-to-peer networks has given us a test-bed for
market-allocated namespaces, and the news isn't good. Despite the
obvious value in having a single interoperable system for instant
messaging, to take one example, we don't have interoperability because
AOL is (unsurprisingly) unwilling to abandon the value in owning the
majority of those addresses. The winner in a post-DNS market would
potentially have even more control and less accountability than ICANN
does today.

- Names as a Public Good

The two best theories of network value we have -- Metcalfe's law for
point-to-point networks and Reed's law for group-forming networks --
both rely on optionality, the possibility actually creating any of the
untold potential connections that might exist on large networks.
Valuable networks allow nodes to connect to one another without
significant transaction costs.

Otherwise identical networks will thus have very different values for
their users, depending on how easy or hard it is to form connections.
In this theory, the worst damage spam does is not in wasting
individual user's time, but in making users skeptical of all mail from
unknown sources, thus greatly reducing the possibility of unlikely
connections. (What if you got real mail from Nigeria?)

Likewise, a system that provides a global namespace, managed as a
public good, will create enormous value in a network, because it will
lower the transaction costs of establishing a connection or group
globally. It will also aid innovation by allowing new applications to
bootstrap into an existing namespace without needing explicit
coordination or permission. Despite its flaws, and despite ICANN's
deteriorating stewardship, this is what the DNS currently does.

- Names Are Inevitable

We make sense of the world by naming things. Faced with any sort of
numerical complexity, humans require tools for oversimplifying, and
names are one of the best oversimplifications we have.  We have only
recently created systems that require global namespaces (ship
registries, telephone numbers) so we're not very good at it yet. In
most of those cases, we have used existing national entities to
guarantee uniqueness -- we get globally unique phone numbers if we
have nationally unique phone numbers and globally unique country
codes.

The DNS, and the internet itself, have broken this 'National
Partition' solution because the derive so much of their value from
being so effortlessly global. There are still serious technical issues
with the DNS, such as the need for domain names in non-English
character sets, as well as serious political issues, like the need for
hundreds if not thousands of new top-level domains.  However, it would
be hard to overstate the value created by memorable and globally
unique domain names, names that are accessible to any application
without requiring advance coordination, and which lower the
transaction costs for making connections.

There are no pure engineering solutions here, because this is not a
pure engineering problem. Human interest in names is a deeply wired
characteristic, and it creates political and legal issues because
names are genuinely important. In the 4 years since its founding,
ICANN has moved from being merely unaccountable to being actively
anti-democratic, but as reforming or replacing ICANN becomes an urgent
problem, we need to face the dilemma implicit in namespaces generally:
Memorable, Global, Non-political -- pick two.

* Things worth reading  =============================================

- "Navigating Size Transitions in the Midsize Church"

Alice Mann's description of phase changes arising from congregation
size: 

  "The family sized church, with attendance of 0-50 is followed by the
  pastoral size congregation, with 50-150 in attendance for a service.
  Following this comes the Program sized church, with 150-350 in
  attendance; followed by corporate sized congregations, with 350-500+
  present for worship."
  [http://www.uua.org/cde/midsize2000/theme.html]

- "Town Meetings"

FAQ on Massachusetts town meetings, including several scale effects:

  "[Q:] How is it determined whether a town has an open Town Meeting or a
  representative Town Meeting?

  [A:] Towns with fewer than 6,000 inhabitants must have an open Town
  Meeting. Towns with more than 6,000 inhabitants may adopt either form
  of Town Meeting at their discretion."
  [http://www.state.ma.us/sec/cis/cistwn/twnidx.htm]

Thanks to Shawna Vogel of MIT for these two pointers.

- David Reed on Spectrum Management

  "So my question morphed into the question: "is there a physical
  limit to the capacity of a system of radios as the density of the
  radios increases?" And I realized something very interesting: radio
  signals don't interfere with each other! That may seem surprising,
  because engineers and regulators use the metaphor of "interference"
  to get their work done. But in fact, radio signals just add to each
  other, non-destructively. And it turns out that what we call
  "interference" is actually best thought of as "limitations of a
  particular receiver technology".
  
  [http://www.satn.org/archive/2002_01_20_archive.html#8971522]
  [There is also a link to a Reed Powerpoint presentation to the FCC
  http://ftp.fcc.gov/realaudio/presentations/2002/042602/Spectrum_Capacity_Myth.ppt
  but it didn't work for me, so I can't vouch for it. 
  Power corrupts; Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.]
 
* Questions I am asking myself  =====================================

- Why have MUDs and MOOs gotten so much attention?

If you were to peruse the literature on social software, you would
think that MUDs and MOOs were a hugely important category of software,
given the volume written about them.  Meanwhile, back where the users
are, social software is primarily the CC: line, multi-player games,
and weblogs, and almost no one uses MUDs or MOOs.

What was it about MUDs and MOOs that made them so much more attractive
to academics and researchers than their actual use seems to warrant?

- What have we lost with the waning of usenet?

Many people wrote in saying that spam and the Web killed usenet, which
is obviously true, but makes the question to "Why has spam not killed
web boards?" I think the answer is in part that web boards are harder
to find, have smaller audiences, and use non-standard interfaces, so
they fall below even the spammers minimal 'work for effect' threshold.

This in turn makes me wonder what we have lost with the waning of
usenet, because the barriers to spammers are also the barriers to
users. Usenet had obviously outlived much of its usefulness -- the
idea that everyone on the internet who likes cats would go to
rec.pets.cats obviously became untenable. However, for narrower and more
technical discussions, usenet provided a default conversation, thus
maximizing the chance that anyone anywhere could meet the half-dozen
other people working on re-writing the Linux kernel in VisualBasic.

Like Gnutella suceeding Napster because Napster's centralization made
it a legal target, the ease of automating usenet searches made it a
target for spam, so we moved to a fragmented world of email lists and
web boards, even where that fragmentation damages the conversation. 

* End ===============================================================

Copyright 2002, Clay Shirky
Feel free to reprint, quote, or forward, so long as you credit me.