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A long time ago in a network far far away domain names were born. They were rolled out in 1986 and replaced a simple mapping of hostnames to ip addresses, which would not scale as the network grew.
To get a domain name you simply asked for one, in email, from the internic, and your com/net/org name suddenly worked. The US National Science Foundation contrated Network Solutions to maintain the domain name databases and run the "root servers" which tell your computer where .com is and where .net is and so on and so forth. In 1996 Jonothon Cainer wrote an article in Wired about how he registered McDonalds.com and offered to sell it to McDonalds who refused, so he sold it to Burger King. That was it for domain names, they sunddenly overniht became a speculators dream: free to get and if the name was "creative" it would have great intrinsic worth: sex.com and business.com sold for millions. As soon as that wired article came out the amount of time between submitting a domain request to the internic went from 3 days to 11 weeks. The .com zone, that is, all names that end in .com, grew nearly exponentially and a great fear and uncertainty was felt in the technical community as .com neared the one million name mark. Nothing happened of course and .com has seen as many as 50 million names at its peak, although it's down to 30 million at the time of writing (dec 08). in 1996 the volume of domain name registrations was such that the NSF didn't want to pay for it. The FNCAC advised the NSF to tell the Internic to begin charging for domain names. Brian Reid said it best. Keep in mind he personally funded the $2 to get the DNS software ("BIND") running and paid Paul Vixie to write it. "I feel like a dork paying for domain names. But I don't know what to do about it". The "DNS mess" was discussed on various Internet mailing lists - recall this was before the modern day web. At the time there weren't that many websites and not everybody on the network thought the web was worth looking at. Two camps materialized: one that wanted total control over every top level domain and one that favored no such single choke point. We lost and now we have ICANN. In 1996 Jon Postel who used to edit the root zone, but sadly died in the middle of the DNS mess, proposed 300 new top level domains be added, 150 right now and 150 the next year. In the decade ICANN has been around, they've added 7 new tlds. And really stupid ones at that. Our root zone has hundreds of new top level domains. And we think you should use them. That's why we do this. |