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*Home > Background, including
Surveillance comment Background
Commercialization of Internet surveillance is the modern slave trade! Any
site that pops up a notice telling you 'we respect
your privacy' doesn't, or they wouldn't have to tell
you. Normally the notice is followed by a
request to plant cookies and 'other tracking
technology' on your device in order to disrespect
your privacy. Or worse, they tell you that by
using their site you accept their use of cookies,
etc. We don't issue a cookie warning. We don't
issue cookies. We don't track users. Why
should we? We don't want to sell you anything,
and we don't want to sell you to anyone else! Now to Multiplexed Names: In 1994 I created a public website for a very large, high tech company headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a rational business decision to register the company name under the .se country code top level, but also under .com and, since the company is multinational, a large number of additional country code top levels. I
subsequently checked the local telephone directory and
found there were 100 unrelated companies in the
Stockholm area listed under 4 variant spellings of our
company name, which is based on a common Swedish family
name. None of the others could register .com or
country code .se using 'our' name spelling and, by some
standards, anyone using their variant spelling could be
accused of typo-squatting. So - one company could prevent 100 other companies, in Stockholm alone, from presenting themselves under their familiar name on the Internet, many more in the rest of Sweden, and even more in those countries where we registered under the local country code TLD. In March, 2023, an online directory found 12,781 companies in Sweden under the name Ericsson. The lack of appropriate domain names doesn't make the Internet a safer, more secure and inviting place for companies, organizations and individuals. It is a limiting factor that invites abuse. These DNS limitations don't promote the public interest. You may recite 'first come, first served' but that's misleading and semantically incorrect. It's 'first come, exclusively served'. Citing 'first come' doesn't mitigate the damage to all those who are not served. You may claim 'that's how the Internet works' but demonstrates how it doesn't. You don't dismiss ransomware injections that take down the East Coast fuel supply as an example of 'how the Internet works'. Remember, the Internet once 'worked' only when domain names were written in letter/digit/hyphen ASCII. Why should everyone in the world be required to speak a subset of American English. IDNA (Internationalized names) solved the language problem by adding a little code to every browser. This code is invisible to the user. Where's the innovative technical solution to the 'first come exclusively served' conundrum? Requirements include unlimited naming, full backward compatibility, easy to learn and apply, that only a browser update is required (not network infrastructure), and that no current name holders and their content are negatively impacted. Multiplexed Names meet the requirements. Both the telephone network and social networks like Facebook manage 'unlimited' users with the same name/spelling as the company mentioned above. There are approximately 350.4 million domain names registered across all top-level domains (end of Q4, 2022, according to Verisign) but Facebook has 2.95 billion monthly users. The WIPO has handled >50,000 UDRP cases involving the DNS, but needn't mediate 'rightful ownership' of Facebook user names or telephone numbers. The phone in your pocket has added new features and functions since 1993, and you use it more. Domain naming hasn't evolved. It can, and should. In his
1999 book Weaving the Web,
Tim Berners-Lee, wrote: He could have written: Both statements were correct at the time he wrote, but for at least the last decade non-LDH ASCII ('foreign' characters and scripts) have been translated by the IDNA edge application in every browser. It's easy to improve the Domain Name System to point to multiple users of 'the same name'. Full disclosure: we have no affiliation with any TLD registry, registrar or re-seller.
February 1, 2024 |