Do we really need Top-Level Domains?

I was recently invited to sign a petition that calls for the .ca top-level domain (TLD) to be further categorized into specific second-level domains (SLDs): .co.ca for businesses, .gov.ca for government, and so on. The British and Australians do it that way, after all. The petition was started by a Yukon College colleague with the eminently sensible desire to make it easier for web surfers, particularly the less-savvy netizens, to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial entities (Laurie's blog has since moved to snazzier digs).

I say the opposite: get rid of TLDs and SLDs altogether. Oh, we may want to keep the country code TLDs -- and their regional SLD children (e.g., .yk.ca for Yukon, .ak.us for Alaska) -- for patriotism's sake, but the rest can go.

The reason is that the allocation of generic TLDs has always been arbitrary. You don't have to be a company to reserve a .com address, a non-profit organization to reserve .org, nor an Internet service provider to reserve .net. For example, php.net takes you to the home site of a web application scripting platform; php.org leads to a company that provides tools for the php.net platform; and php.com reveals the home page of the non-profit Parents Helping Parents organization. None of them possess the "correct" TLD.

So, if they don't mean anything, why use 'em? There's already a move afoot to jettison the redundant www. hostname (as this blog has done), why not trim the tail end as well? If I want to visit Apple Computer's site, I type apple into the browser address bar. To see the Whitehorse Star's news, I enter whitehorsestar and be done with it. Many browsers will let you do just that: the software slaps on a .com, maybe dresses it up with a www., and then shoots the request out the door. (Firefox actually searches for the term and redirects you to the top-listed site, which typically yields the same result.)

There's no benefit to the neophyte surfer under my suggested regime: domain names are just as opaque as before, if not more so. But we can't regulate our way out of education. Someone will still have to teach Johnny Hunt-n-Peck and Susie Download-em-All that iwillscrewyouover.co.ca is not necessarily a more secure site than respectableshoes.

Of course, ejecting TLDs at this late date would merely launch a gajillion WWF-style trademark lawsuits. Reshuffling the .ca TLD would do the same, if on a more polite scale.

Should the petition succeed, look forward to visiting www.whathesaid.technology.college.comment.info.arkell.whitehorse.yk.ca. If instead my idea gets traction, watch for my legal tussle with Joshua T. Andrzejewski.