- From: Chris Beer <chris@e-beer.net.au>
- Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 22:37:19 +1100
- To: Gannon Dick <gannon_dick@yahoo.com>
- CC: "W3C eGov Interest Group (All)" <public-egov-ig@w3.org>
Hmmm. An interesting conversation as I come back off holidays (yes - I owe people some other replies - Gannon - watch out for one on LDA's in Aust. tomorrow sometime :) ). And one that ties in nicely with the earlier discussion on URI's and other tech's such as handle.net etc. To throw some thoughts in the mix: 1) Technically, the US started all this by opting to take over .com, .net, etc instead of using .us - for shame. That instantly broke the idea of TLD's being country specific. 2) Quite a number of smaller countries, or states with small internet presences, such as Greenland, Tonga, Libya, Colombia etc allow registrars to openly sell second level domains in these TLD's to anyone (or to those who cut appropriate deals) - therefore, as a straight up business transaction, I don't see how Denmark (.dk) loses out. 3) On top of this, you have the http://to./ shortening service, run by the .to TLD authority themselves - and you thought goo.gl was a problem re: IANA Root Zone and 3166-1. On top of this, Tonga doesn't even operate a whois registry - it's like the Cayman Islands of the Internet. 4) To further stir the pop on this discussion, I give you .tv - Tuvalu. Now here is a case where A country pretty much sold off/leased the rights to it's domain completely - Google is a bit player compared to VeriSign in this case. In short - there are examples of atleast 50 TLD's which are used as vanity URI's by commercial interests, or sold by registrars for this reason. Ok - so where am I going with all this. *EVERY* URI (or old school URL) is a redirect - they all ultimately resolve to an IP address. Even handle.net permanent URI's. Which makes the UK and US approach to thier archiving and permanence as discussed by Anne and David in another thread very valid - there really isn't a one size fits all approach to redirects and Cool URI's - its horses for courses and even bit.ly can work for some governments after appropriate scoping. Sure we might debate whether go.us.gov is better than gov.us as a shortener - end of the day we'll trust and use either knowing it is a government service, without complaint. The thing about a Cool URI isn't that it's permanent - after all - permanence is an illusion - companies can go bust, countries can cease to exist, IP addresses can simply go down. And it isn't it's semantic - no where in any of the key Cool URI documents does it say that example.com has to be semantic - in fact, Internationalized TLD's forces a rethink of the semantics of the actual second level domain. The semantics come AFTER the TLD. It's all the bits after the first /. In that sense goo.gl/person/alice_brown is a perfectly valid Cool URI - it has trust (I know it is reputable), it has provenence (I know it's pretty reliable in terms of what it returns), and it makes for a perfect permanent search query (google me everything about people called Alice Brown.) And way easier to remember than http://www.google.com/search?q=alice+brown I'd expect that imdb.tv/person/alice_brown will return me an article on Alice Brown, the actress. Or that t.co/person/alice_brown will take me to the twitter account of Alice Brown. And that w3.org/person/alice_brown will take me to the home page of Alice Brown who works at the W3. The domain gives context in a perfect Cool URI world, and assists in determining uniqueness - it certainly, in reality, in the now, has nothing to do with actual countries, no matter how much we want it to. If it does, it can only really be seen as a pleasant coincidence. Thoughts and flames always appreciated. Cheers Chris On 12/14/2010 5:45 AM, Gannon Dick wrote: > A recent contest involving Google's Chrome OS featured a contest which involved recognition of the "Google URL Shortener" at http://goo.gl/ > > The "only" problems are that this convention conflicts with both the IANA Root Zone [1] and ISO 3166-1 [2]. > > This highlights the problem of "hand offs" between Central Governments and Local Governments. In this case, the Kingdom of Denmark (an EU Member), has lost a measure of control of a subdivision (Greenland) in Cyberspace. > > --Gannon > > [1] http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/gl.html > [2] http://www.iso.org/iso/iso-3166-1_decoding_table > > > >
Received on Tuesday, 14 December 2010 11:37:34 UTC