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Is It Time For .tel? 292

Posted by Hemos from the how-to-differentiate dept.
Vitaly Friedman writes "ICANN, the body responsible for creating top-level domains, is considering a new one. Conceived as a way to easily manage contact information in an age where many people have numerous contact numbers, the proposed .tel TLD would allow individuals and companies to keep all of their contact information in an easily accessible location. Companies would get companyname.tel while individuals would be able to register firstnamelastname.tel." This idea has been kicked around for quite a while; one of the question is the whole name-space collision issue. For instance, there's me and then there's other me. Lemme tell how strange it is getting fan mail for country music stars.
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Is It Time For .tel? More

Is It Time For .tel?

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  • Unforseen problems (Score:5, Funny)

    by robyannetta ( 820243 ) * on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:00AM (#15141500) Homepage
    Companies would get companyname.tel while individuals would be able to register firstnamelastname.tel.

    This may pose a problem with the 526,000+ people sharing the name Michael Smith.

    • Re:Unforseen problems (Score:5, Insightful)

      by The Snowman ( 116231 ) * on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:06AM (#15141531)

      This may pose a problem with the 526,000+ people sharing the name Michael Smith.

      Or the people who share names with companies [ncchelp.org]. Or the people who share names with each other. There will be collisions. This plan will not work for its stated purpose. However, its stated purpose and its real purpose most likely are not the same. Odds are, this is just another plan to make more money for the registrars by opening up a new land rush of domain name registrations.

      • Re:Unforseen problems (Score:2, Insightful)

        by sslayer ( 968948 )

        Or the people who share names with companies. Or the people who share names with each other. There will be collisions.

        I could see a way this would work. Whenever you ask for your namelastname.tel or mycompanyname.tel you won't get that domain for you, instead you would have to fill in a form in which you write a brief description of who you or your company are and write down your contact information, including your real website.
        This way, if I need to contact with some person or company, I'll type itsn

      • Cynical churning of market (Score:5, Insightful)

        by NetSettler ( 460623 ) <kent-slashdot@nhplace.com> on Monday April 17, 2006 @04:17PM (#15144395) Homepage Journal

        Odds are, this is just another plan to make more money for the registrars

        I don't see how it could be otherwise.

        First, the phone company already knows that the best way to index phone number is by soundex, to avoid massive problems caused by the fact that many people don't know the correct spellings of their friends' and associates' names. And they certainly aren't sounding like this will be the first domain indexed by soundex.

        Second, it's unlikely that domain ownership will be a prerequisite to having a phone number. I don't think they could sell that. (In fact, they might realistically make more by saying they were going to give away the domain with your name and invent a service called ... hmmm, let's see... how about the "unlisted domain" where the customer pays money to keep from being locatable.)

        Third, phone numbers have the virtue of being uncorrelated with a name. That's what makes them resolvable in ambiguity--they act as a cross-check to make sure you got it right. When you can't quite remember a number and think it's either 555-1234 or 555-1235 and then check information to find the first is for "Sam Smith" and the second for "Alex Jones", there's little doubt how to resolve things. But if you thought the number was 1387.Sam.Smith.com or 1386.Sam.Smith.com or maybe 1387.Samuel.Smith.com or maybe 1386.Samuel.Smith or 1387.Sam.Smythe.com or... Obviously finding out that the mis-remembered number matches a lot of same-named people won't help at all. (If you believe in correlating names with telephones this way, it's a short conceptual hop to believing that a .pw domain would help you remember your password.)

        If you can't autogenerate good phone numbers (i.e., tell people what name they're supposed to use), as I and many others here have argued you can't, what's the alternative? Allow people to choose? Gads, with all the domain squatting it's clear that this would allow much choice to a rich few and little choice to most people. And so it would not be fair at all. The fairest thing I can imagine is to not involve ICANN at all.

        And besides, back to the original point about this being a ploy to sell domain registries, if I wanted to have the domain system already remember my phone number, why wouldn't I just have people do nslookup on the names I already own? They already require domain owners to list their phone numbers.

    • Re:Unforseen problems (Score:5, Funny)

      by kryten_nl ( 863119 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:09AM (#15141552)
      Yes, perhaps we should add numbers to the back of the name. Come to think of it, maybe it would be better to define the name by numbers as well, then you wouldn't have to worry about typos and phonetic problems. Maybe this system should look something like:

      2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334
      Or 8 groups of 4 hexadecimal digits.

      [/sarcasm]
    • Just use social security numbers!
      • Over 95% of all people don't have a "social security number". (Most of them don't even have social security, BTW.)

    • Re:Unforseen problems (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Greedo ( 304385 )
      while individuals would be able to register firstnamelastname.tel.

      Isn't this what .NAME was for?

  • .tel is ok (Score:4, Insightful)

    by caffeination ( 947825 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:00AM (#15141502)
    At least .tel is slightly international. Loads of European languages have telephone-related words beginning with "tel".

    This is way better than .biz, which I can only guess that they just banged out without thinking twice about.

    • Re:.tel is ok (Score:2, Insightful)

      by evilbuny ( 553280 )
      Why do we need yet another TLD, this is purely a political land grab, e164.org already has proven you don't need a special TLD to do this, we have a large dataset already in operation and working. Jeff Pulver has been pushing .tel since 2000 and yet he could have built up his own zone to do this with less effort and money...
    • Business is a well-understood term world-wide. It's even been included in quite a few languages, although the spelling is sometimes altered: bisness, bisnis, and so on.

      Having said that, I don't see the necessity for any new TLDs.

    • Re:.tel is ok (Score:5, Funny)

      by wizrd_nml ( 661928 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:28AM (#15141651) Homepage
      In the Middle East we find this hilarious. Biz in Arabic means breast.

      • Re:.tel is ok (Score:3, Funny)

        by Khuffie ( 818093 )
        And soon we'll have .zib ;)
      • Perhaps the next poll should be 'Favourite TLD?' then?
      • In the Middle East we find this hilarious. Biz in Arabic means breast.

        That sly bunch, so they did find a way for a .xxx domain to be put in place.
      • In the Middle East we find this hilarious. Biz in Arabic means breast.

        In the Us, we find it hilarious, because .biz means SPAM.

        Instead of using .tel, why don't phones gain the capabilities of mapping one's email address to a telephone number. Email addresses are unique, and most people have a business and private email address. I find it redundant to ask for someone's name, phone and email address. Phone numbers seem so 1970s to me.

    • Sure, just think of parkho.tel...

      I wonder when we will get .pr for the Prussian nation...
  • Maybe it's about time we stopped conforming to top level domains?

    If I want a web site, why can't it be www.boxlight -- or www.boxlight.this.is.cool -- why does it have to end in .com, .us, .ca, or dot anything?

    boxlight
    • It's a way of organizing sites by name in a useful way. Slashdot.jp [slashdot.jp] is the best example I can come up with on the spot.

    • If I want a web site, why can't it be www.boxlight -- or www.boxlight.this.is.cool -- why does it have to end in .com, .us, .ca, or dot anything?

      I've been saying this for years. Part of the reason is not rocking the boat. The current system works well enough. But I think there's fears of unleashing a tidal wave of trademark lawsuits, since TLDs, as it currently stands, can't be owned.

      Personally, I think there is no fundamental reason why one should not be able to register,"HATE.MICROSOFT" so you could hav

    • Re:eliminate top-level domains ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by a_nonamiss ( 743253 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:41AM (#15141727)
      Actually, it's a function of how the current heirarchical domain system works. I'm not saying that it's absolutely required, but we would have to change quite a bit of the fundamental nature of the Internet if we eliminated all TLD's. I'm going to grossly oversimplify here, but basically, when I submit a query for foo.com, the very first thing queried is the top level domain, in this case, .com. If I were to submit a query to foo.org, the query would take a different path in resolving the name. Same with foo.net, foo.us, foo.biz, etc. The bottom line is that something needs to provide the first basic direction as to how the query is resolved. foo.com is a sub-domain of .com. support.foo.com is a subdomain of foo.com. us.support.foo.com is a subdomain of support.foo.com, etcerera. Without top level domains, we would basically make every DNS query a top-level query, and we would have to change the basic structure for how the Internet works. Note: for a more detailed definition of how DNS queries work, I highly recommend googling the subject. Makes for good nerd reading, and I'm sure the thousands of pages you get will do a better explanation than my single paragraph.

      • how the current heirarchical domain system works ... we would have to change quite a bit

        Well... really what would have to change is (non-recursive-querying) resolver code, and since that is distributed to practically every Internet host, that likely would take time.

        However, the server-side and administrative-side changes would stay largely the same, and there is no need to abandon hierarchical delegation of parts of the global distributed dabase.

        There are two obvious approaches.

        The first possible approach

      • I'm going to grossly oversimplify here, but basically, when I submit a query for foo.com, the very first thing queried is the top level domain, in this case, .com. If I were to submit a query to foo.org, the query would take a different path in resolving the name. Same with foo.net, foo.us, foo.biz, etc.

        Yeah, try http://slashdot.com/ [slashdot.com] , http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] , http://slashdot.net/ [slashdot.net] , http://slashdot.info/ [slashdot.info] , http://slashdot.tv/ [slashdot.tv] and see what the results are.

        Everything that is not slashdot.org is a wannabe, and e

  • This is a really good idea (Score:4, Funny)

    by BadAnalogyGuy ( 945258 ) <BadAnalogyGuy@gmail.com> on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:01AM (#15141507)
    We can put it to good use like .coop, .cat, .biz, .arpa, .aero, .info, .jobs, .mobi, .museum, .name, .pro, .travel, and .int.

    God knows it's time for .tel.

  • Phone sex (Score:5, Funny)

    by thewiz ( 24994 ) * on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:01AM (#15141510)
    In the spirit of delicio.us, I can see a porn site called showand.tel being registered.

  • In the discussion on the proposed .mail TLD [slashdot.org] I already pointed out why this won't work [slashdot.org].

  • Intended purposes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rob T Firefly ( 844560 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:03AM (#15141517) Homepage Journal
    It's pretty fun to watch ICANN and the domain industry constantly come up with new "specific-purpose" domains, which upon release sell to absolutely anyone and everyone regardless of the actual category of the site. Apart from the actually restricted ones like .gov, .mil, and .edu, sites' categories have had little to nothing to do with their domain extensions for ages now.

    Who still remembers when a .com actually meant a for-profit business, or when every .org was an organization of some kind?
    • I used to wonder about this. I ended up sticking with .net (in all my previous domain names), because I felt I could be considered as "providing infrastructure" in the form of user comment posting (which I currently don't have).

      The problem, as far as I can tell, is that nobody foresaw demand for personal websites, so no personal website TLD was created. The result of this is that the mental barriers between the TLDs have been broken down. It's just the sort of thing language does when an important, popular

      • And maybe that's the problem. There is still no concept of a personal TLD. I've registered a .ca, because i'm from Canada, but I don't really think it's appropriate. I think there's a lot of sites that don't follow the guidelines for using TLDs. Even Mozilla.org switched made everyone start going to mozilla.com to download firefox. I think that most of the problem though is with personal websites. Most people I know end up registering in .com,.org,.net, because it's easy for people to remember, and t
      • True. Most of my domains have been .net for that exact reason, and in some twisted way this has evolved into a weird reverse-mindshare thing, where I'll automatically attribute a "cool" factor to a site ending in .net and be more likely to check it out.
      • In the UK, amongst all sorts of other sensible restrictions on what can go in the various second level domains, we have .me.uk for individual people.
    • Thankfully, we in the UK have a relatively sensible system of second level domains. .net.uk, for example, is ISPs only.

      • Re:Intended purposes (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Haeleth ( 414428 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @10:48AM (#15142102) Journal
        Thankfully, we in the UK have a relatively sensible system of second level domains. .net.uk, for example, is ISPs only.

        Yes, but that doesn't stop plenty of people in the UK, like me, (ab)using the global .net TLD for personal sites.

        And why not? I'm no more a "com"pany or an "org"anisation than I am a "net"work provider. I'm not a "biz"ness, and I'm not dedicated to providing "info"rmation, and the domain is not my real "name". But nor do I want a country-specific domain -- my site is of very limited interest to the vast majority of people, but the tiny community it interests is spread right across the globe. My site isn't aimed particularly at people in the UK, so why should it have a misleading .uk on the end?

        What it comes down to is, there is no point whatsoever in trying to force an artificial hierarchy onto something like the internet, which is an interconnected network, not a neat and nicely categorised tree. It doesn't work. It's pointless and confusing. Let's just give it up already, okay?

        • Well said. There seems little point in TLDs these days other than to cause trademark fights. Why not take a page from heirarchy free websites and, if we must keep some ghost of TLDs, implement a DNS tagging system. A domain could be tagged with "com" or "org" or "whatever". Search engines and browsers would be aware of this, if anyone cared. This could be run by the same folks who do things now and be enforced so only educational institutions could be tagged "edu" for example.

          • Re:Intended purposes (Score:3, Interesting)

            by fossa ( 212602 )

            Now that I think about it, the divisions into "com", "net", "org" help avoid collisions, but do so in a most useless manner. Say for example, that McDonalds is a purveyor of fine foods, and registers mcdonalds.com. Now, Old McDonald had a farm but now sells farm equipment and would like to register mcdonalds.com. Trademark law allows McDonald's Fast Food and McDonald's Farm Equipment to coexist, but it is unfair to allow one to register the domain but not the other. One soultion would be to deny mcdonalds.

  • Pretty pointless imo... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by c0l0 ( 826165 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:04AM (#15141519) Homepage
    Of course that's another chance for ICANN, VeriSign and domain name resellers to cash in without much of a hassle, due to DNS' easily extensible and robust nature - however, much like .info and .name, this TLD presumeably won't be a big hit.
    The problem with all these newly introduced TLDs is that they don't ring a bell for the average joe on teh intarweb, since most casual users are familiar with .com, .net and maybe .org only, plus maybe their country's TLD.

    • Does it really matter for most individuals that their website is not too memorable? That's what your bookmarks files (or favorites) are for.

      You just send a link to anyone interested and put one in your email .sig. I remember about 3 phone numbers. The rest are in my phone. It seems the same to me...

  • MichaelBolton.Tel (Score:5, Funny)

    by JeanBaptiste ( 537955 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:04AM (#15141521)
    No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!

  • Another dumb idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Billosaur ( 927319 ) * <wgrotherNO@SPAMoptonline.net> on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:06AM (#15141530) Journal

    When is everyone going to stop assuming that issuing new TLDs is going to solve all their problems? What, is it impossible for people to update the contact information on their personal web sites now, or has their been some fundamental change to HTML/XML of which I am unaware?

    This is a dumb idea. I won't even touch the personal namespace problem, which should be evident to anyone with a brain. The only way that would work is if everyone had five names. You know there are going to be squabbles over company names, as old and new companies jockey for the .tel names that offer them the best marketing bang for the buck.

    Need a place to put your contact information? Try www.contact.your-web-site-name-here.whatever. ICANN needs to stop polluting the TLD pool.

    • All new TLDs do is make it so companies have to spend another $15/year to protect their trademarks. How often do you see two domain names with the same name but different TLDs and they are truly different sites? Yes, there are some good examples (whitehouse.gov/com), but for the most part, the "other" sites redirect to the main site or are parked by domain squatters.

    • The whole thing is dumb. Surely it isn't all that difficult to use subdomains, like tel.foo.com or tel.foo.net?

      If everyone adopted the format: tel.{company}.{tld} for their contact page, rather than bitching about new TLDs, then the number of collisions will be fewer (like foo.com, foo.net) and the world would be just as happy.

      Disclaimer: I haven't read (nor will I read) TFA.
    • When is everyone going to stop assuming that issuing new TLDs is going to solve all their problems?

      "When I issued the first few TLDs, things were good...then I issued a couple more...but now I'm just issuing more TLDs to take my problems away.

      "Hi, my name is ICANN, and I'm a TLDaholic."

  • Those who do not understand 'finger' (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:12AM (#15141564)
    Are doomed to reinvent it.

    So lets see, we create a whole separate _TLD_ that people/companies must register, just so people can have www.foo.tel, which is essentially a directory of who's who at www.foo.com?

    This is completely idiotic. How about "finger @foo.com | grep -i 'your name'" Obviously wrap it into some kind of GUI, or do something as simple as a web front end to an existing in-house address book?

    Geesh. Next someone will invent the ".mail" TLD, which is the address for foo.com, that you use to send email to. what about ".web" ?
  • Todd Masonis, a co-founder of contact management service Plaxo Inc., is familiar with the hassles of keeping track of everyone. His parents have had the same house and phone number for some 30 years, and "for a long time that was how they are identified," Masonis said.

    Really? Your parents are called Mr and Mrs 945 Chestnut Street? How odd.

    -Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
    • I hate Plaxo with a fiery passion. Completely offtopic, but in our new "Web 2.0" world, this is a couple of billion customers. Witness Plaxo: http://www.plaxo.com/about [plaxo.com] [plaxo.com] and this gem:

      Number of connections - Over a billion connections**
      ** People who have not installed Plaxo or joined Plaxo Online, but are connected to Plaxo members.

      "They haven't signed up for our 'service', but they COULD, or they have a cousin who is registered, so we feel justified in counting them!"

  • Conceived as a way to easily manage contact information in an age where many people have numerous contact numbers

    Ugh?

    Can you get any more pointless than this? If you have a .com, you have a "Contact Us" link...

  • This should be seen as an opportunity rather than a problem, since it's a real pain in todays global society that multiple people have the same moniker. Simply require that each persons name be unique in order to qualify for a .tel, and if it isn't they must change it by deed poll (or whatever legal mechanism in their country) to be so, by addition of one or more middle or nick names, or other modification. Thus JeffHemosBates.tel etc.

    Problem solved ;).

  • Boy does this sound dumb (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hrieke ( 126185 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:17AM (#15141591) Homepage
    .tel provides nothing that currently isn't available right now- Companies have contact pages with the information that you need to fax, phone, or email them your enquiries, people have their email and myspace pages, and all that I can see a .tel page doing is a refer URL forwarding.

    I see this as another $35 per year revenue for the domain registers.
    • .tel provides nothing that currently isn't available right now- Companies have contact pages with the information that you need to fax, phone, or email them your enquiries, people have their email and myspace pages, and all that I can see a .tel page doing is a refer URL forwarding.

      Ah yes, but you forget that URI's are for more than just webpages. Instead of a web page think that you could just have mobile.bigpat.tel in your phone's address book and you would never have to update it. Or home.bigpat.tel.
  • I think ICANN has fallen in to the same pit as any other "Governing Body". We may have finally defeated the stupid .xxx idea, and here comes the next brain fart.

    Just what do they plan to do about the 1.1 million "John Smith"s that live in the use (not to mention any other countries? Append a number? Gee that sound familiar.

    I can see some excelent uses of the .tel domain. Especially for straightening out the IP phone problems private companies are proprietarily solving themselves. But ICANN will never think
    • We may have finally defeated the stupid .xxx idea, and here comes the next brain fart.

      How can you say that a .xxx TLD a stupid idea??? I think it is a great idea. It seems like a fairly easy idea to keep porn out of the hands of kids while at the same time, letting those who want to look at porn do so without jumping through hoops OR having the government sue Google for our search practices!!!

      I have always believed it be a law that there be a new "META" tag in HTML. Something of the sorts

      <meta

  • ...the proposed .tel TLD would allow individuals and companies to keep all of their contact information in an easily accessible location.

    In an age of too much communication how about a top level domain called .dnc (do not call) that has all of my contact information. Oh wait, why don't I just not make it available to everyone in the first place. Today with the "Do not call list" being so popular and being able to keep your contact information private when registering a new domain this new .tel tld seem

  • I don't get why an individual would want to buy a domain name and server space just to park their contact information. Are they aiming for the business individual? Why couldn't I just put it on my regular website? I don't see the point in getting a domain name for this. Like the artical stated, this is overkill for something that is already done. Search engines already find contact information for companies that have it on their regular site. Plus if a company did do this it would take a while before the se

  • Too little too late (Score:3, Interesting)

    by suv4x4 ( 956391 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:38AM (#15141710)
    It's not that I don't want to see ".tel" happen, but what is taking them so long to approve and implement new top-level domains anyway.

    It's because they were so late to introduce a large variety that ".com" become synonymous with "web" and everybody wanted his site to be a ".com"

    Should've they introduced domains like .tv, .biz and .tel (and .xxx) from the very beginning and at least a dozen more for each specific area of interest/business, we'd not have the ridiculous situation with domain scarcity we have today (even if, as I wrote earlier, it's still possible, although frustrating, to find a good .com domain nowadays).

  • This is a wonderful idea! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:41AM (#15141725)
    companyname.tel is so much better than companyname.com/contact.html!

    Man, I'm in the wrong business; if only I could get paid for coming up with ideas like this...
    • companyname.tel is so much better than companyname.com/contact.html!

      But less intuitive and less economical than contact.companyname.com or telephone.companyname.com. Why should companies have to fork out even more money for more domains?

  • http://synthesizer-pa.tel/ [synthesizer-pa.tel]

    Now I just need to find a way to get an alarm system hooked up to it.

  • An idiotic idea that shows domain names are broken (Score:3, Interesting)

    by earthbound kid ( 859282 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:45AM (#15141752) Homepage
    This is a moronic idea. I'm sure someone else in the thread has explained why by now. Here's my beef though: domain names are a fundamentally bad idea.

    Think about it. Do we still need domain names? People made up the "I'm feeling lucky" ifl: protocol as a joke, but isn't it true? Can't we find anything with Google anyway? Why should we have to remember a particular address with a complicated system of slashes and characters to get to a particular page? Right now, my URL is http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183301&thresho ld=3&mode=thread&commentsort=0&op=Reply [slashdot.org]. But this is an implementation detail. Why am I, a consumer, being exposed to this? Irrelevant implementation details should be hidden from the user! Is what we're seeing now really so far removed from showing me slashdot's IP address? We cover up IP addresses with domain names, because we know it's too hard for people to remember a series of random numbers, but why can't we go the next logical step after this?

    Here's what I'm proposing:

    Let's extend ifl: or something like into a real protocol. A trusted source, or better a network of user selectable sources, assigns keywords to URLs based on tagging by users via hyperlinks to the source and delicious-like tags. Normally, the URL bar shows nothing but the title the site has given itself (in our case, "Slashdot") and the particular page being viewed ("Reply to thread"), but on request, the URL bar can generate a user shareable set of keyword tags for the site with hash codes for pages to prevent collision (think about the addresses generated snipurl and the like; "ifl:Slashdot/4bacc23"). For the purposes of bookmarks, traditional URLs can be stored, but since these URLs won't be exposed to users, Ford Motor company can use a23rf2.ifl and Ford Modeling Agency can use j737bdh.ifl, and no one will care, since it won't be possible to hijack a keyword without the agreement of the majority of users. (No more Whitehouse.coms!) Domain names can stick around, so that people are free to assign multiple IPs to the same site, but the concept will become a background detail that users need to know nothing about. Until the technology is built into all browsers, URL-to-ifl translator sites can fill in the gap: "go to http://ifl.com/Slashdot/4bacc23 [ifl.com] or just ifl:Slashdot/4bacc23..." but since this won't be hard to integrate into browsers as a plug-in, I imagine it can be implemented quickly.

    So, what do you guys think? Am I being naive about the possibility of the keyword space being kept pure without a registrar? Need I point out that the keyword space is *already* polluted, inspite of that barrier?

    • Back to the future (Score:4, Informative)

      by metamatic ( 202216 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @10:19AM (#15141944) Homepage Journal
      What you describe is, in fact, the original way the web was supposed to work. URLs were supposed to be a hidden layer of server-specific information; users would refer to pages via URIs, Uniform Resource Identifiers, and there would be a mapping layer from URI to the current URL.

      Unfortunately, URLs and DNS hacks turned out to be "good enough", nobody saw the need for a global location-independent naming system for web pages, and we ended up with today's system.

  • All contact info in one place - FOR TELEMARKETERS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:46AM (#15141761) Homepage Journal
    Yes, so I can have FirstnameLastname.tel, with my telephone number, so the telemarketing scum can associate my name with my number and bother me.

    Yes, that sounds like a GREAT idea - I think I'll also put my social security number, my alarm codes, a Google maps link to my house, a picture of my house key, and my bank account numbers up there as well.

    Look, if my company wants to set up a contact page they can set up a web page under their already existing domain name. If I want a contact page, I can set it up under my already existing personal web space. What does a new TLD add to this?

    Now, *IF* they were talking about a new transport class (like http:// and ftp://) for encapsulating telephone numbers, such that a link to tel://8675309 would get me Jenny on the line, that *might* be useful.

    But hell - I haven't even signed up for MYCALL@arrl.net to avoid being spammed by any asshole who scrapes my callsign (and I already have this one jackass who has done exactly that - he scraped my callsign and now he keeps adding me to stupid services like plaxo and the like, even though I've told this tool quite sharply that I don't want him bothering me.)

    • Now, *IF* they were talking about a new transport class (like http:/// [http] and ftp:// [ftp] for encapsulating telephone numbers, such that a link to tel://8675309 would get me Jenny on the line, that *might* be useful.

      In fact, "tel:", "fax:", and "modem:" URL schemes were proposed six(!) years ago by a Nokia researcher (RFC 2806 [rfc-editor.org]), but no one seems to have paid them much mind.

  • Something similar is already avaliable in the UK (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BluhDeBluh ( 805090 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @09:52AM (#15141799)
    The domain name .me.uk was originally design for firstname.lastname.me.uk but I only know of one site to use it, and that's a big torrent site. This domain name is pointless except for making companies buy yet another TLD, which really isn't required.

  • So if you have a name that others don't have then you'll be fine. Of course if you are in the vast majority of people who don't have a unique name then unless you are quick its not going to work for you.

    Genius idea, formed on the fact that "John Smith" is of course unique. Hell there have been TWO US presidents in the last 20 years who would have to argue over who got the domain name. This is before we get to countries where its more common to be known as lastname.firstname rather than firstname.lastname

  • I know (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jimktrains ( 838227 )
    Why not:

    ur-domain.ur-tld/contact.ext !?!?!?!?!?

    Whooooo the simplicity....
  • Why do we need even more top level domains? So that companies must register yet another TLD to keep people from claiming pepsi.tel?

    In the minds of the vast majority of internet users, the extension is an afterthought at best. The company I work for is a .net, but of course we had to buy the .com because everyone types it... and the .org just in case... and what's this I hear about .co and .biz??? (comment from the PHB)

    Real progress would be in moving to simplify things; less top level domains. How abo
  • When you're looking for $company, are you going to type in $company.com, $company.fr, $company.de...

    Or are you going to type google.com and search for $company?

  • Contact info in an easily accessible location? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Theatetus ( 521747 ) on Monday April 17, 2006 @10:15AM (#15141923) Journal
    the proposed .tel TLD would allow individuals and companies to keep all of their contact information in an easily accessible location.

    Wow! [tldp.org] If [superpages.com] only [microsoft.com] someone [openldap.org] had [novell.com] thought [isode.com] of [netscape.com] that [rfc.net] before! [view500.com]

  • Yes, lets have another domain because .biz and .info have worked so well... Are there any .biz or .info domains that aren't just spam/scam sites or simple redirects to the .com? (I'm sure there are, but the vast, vast majority of them are spam/scam sites.)

  • Lemme tell how strange it is getting fan mail for country music stars.

    Try getting hit up for autographs after being MISTAKEN for a country music star in person! It happened to me...

    Back in the old days I was in the broadcasting business, and stuck at a tiny country music station in the hills (complete with shag carpeting on the studio wall as sound deadening material) and was forced by my employer to attend a Tim McGraw/Faith Hill concert. (Forced: As in, "If you don't go to the show Saturday, don't com

  • I'm really eager about this new possible top level domain! Please, .tel me more!
  • Finally someone is thinking about a solution to perhaps the biggest problem with all of these telephones we have floating around these days. Frankly I don't see how we've managed for so long. What we need is some kind of numbering system, where somehow each phone in the world can be uniquely identified by a sequence of digits, and then some way to map a person or business's name to those numbers. Maybe then some userspace tools to "assist" people who want to query this "directory". If someone could find
  • Instead of www.domain.com let's use us.domain.com and eu.domain.com, etc and then break it down by state/province and then city

    This would at least allow for several orders of differentiation.... we do it with phone numbers.. ie: prefixes instead of suffixes

    This way you could have multiple companies/individuals, etc. as .com or whatever which would still be semantically correct but have them further identified by their region

    You could register: us.va.richmond.shoegallery.com for a website/address for a busin

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