I'm taking a very cool class this quarter, taught by
Barbara Simons and Ed Felten. It's the Computer Science
Policy Research Seminar. Lots of interesting stuff---
copyright, copy control, privacy, Internet governance, etc.
I've decided on a project about naming, since it's also a
big chunk of my thesis topic. I've copied the abstract below:
Project: Using the Domain Name System for Content
Segregation
World Wide Web content is referred to by Uniform Resource
Locators (URLs).
One portion of the URL is the server (or "host") identifier,
which is
looked up in the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS has a
hierarchal tree
structure, consisting of:
- a single "root zone"
- subsidiary "generic top level domains" (gTLDs, such
as .com) and
"country code top level domains" (ccTLDs, such as .us)
- a vast number of "second-level domains" (such as
stanford.edu) with
their own policies and sub-delegations (e.g.,
dsg.stanford.edu)
Originally DNS had a limited set of generic top level
domains, each with
a specified use: ".mil" for U.S. military sites, ".com" for
corporations,
".org" for non-profit organizations, and so on. However,
with the increasing
popularity of the Web, the meaning of these gTLDs has become
less
distinct. Personal sites are registered in ".com", and
businesses register
their trademarks in all available top-level domains.
Countries with
appealing ccTLDs, such as ".tv" and ".to", offer domain name
registration
to the world at large. ".com" by itself dwarfs the rest of
the DNS tree,
containing nearly all of the second-level delegations.
Recent attempts have been made to reverse this flattening
trend by
restricting the use of portions of the DNS tree, for a
variety of
reasons.
- ICANN, the governing body responsible for allocating
ccTLDs,
has approved the creation of several content-specific
names, such
as ".aero" (air-transport industry), ".name"
(individual use), and
".museum". Typically membership in some group is
necessary for
registering in such domains, but there are only loose
constraints
on what content may appear within sites bearing these
names.
- H.R. 3833 (introduced March 4, 2002) directs the
administrator of the
".us" domain to create a ".kids.us" delegation.
Registering within
this domain would be contingent on agreeing to a set
of guidelines
for what content is appropriate.
- S. 2137 (introduced April 6, 2002) directs ICANN to
create a ".prn"
domain, and mandates that any commercial web site
which is in the
business of "making available ... material that is
harmful to minors"
shall operate their service only under the new domain.
- Various suggestions have been made to reserve
top-level domains for
non-ASCII domain names, such as domain names encoded
in a Chinese
character set.
These attempts bring up a number of interesting technical
and policy questions,
which my project will try to address through position papers
on ICANN
and on the bills mentioned above.
- Is the creation of content-specific domain names
actually useful?
Would the goals of those advocating such domain names
be better served
by a different allocation policy among existing
domains? Is there
any technical reasons to favor the broadening of the
DNS tree?
- Is content segregation by domain name effective?
Can children be
shielded from inappropriate content using such
mechanisms without
infringing on the rights of adults?
- Are there first amendment issues involved in naming?
(For example,
would the government be able to restrict the titles
which books
are given?)
- Does the U.S. government retain the right to
administer the entire
domain name system? Or must any proposal such as
".prn" be subject
to the same process as other new gTLDs?
- What are the implications of content segregation
policies on
other protocols which use DNS, such as e-mail, and on
other
naming technologies, such as LDAP or Freenet?