Re: Second level domains for individuals, ncc@localhost

> There is a hot debate in Hungary. Some peoples want me to
> start registering second level domains for individuals.

Arbitrary individuals ?

The debate will become even hotter as soon as you start
to implement such plan. Perhaps so hot as to cause a
partial meltdown of the internet as we know it.
Look at what happened to the *.com domain. Even most
knowledgable and repectable people did not foresee that
this would grow out-of-hand so soon as it does now.

Registering individuals in one single domain constitutes
essentially one enormous flat namespace.
The DNS was designed to avoid just that, both for technical
and administrative reasons.

From a technical view, I am not convinced that the DNS will
be able to gracefully handle domains with, say, a million
entries. Not an extraordinary number in the long run for a 
big country.

But presumably the administrative burden will be overwhelming.
Compare this with administration in real life, be it civil
registration, telephone directories, you name it.
All has been organized in a distributed matter of some sort,
e.g. geographically. Apparently that's the way to survive.

Think about arbitration of names. A first-come first-serve
policy would be totally unrealistic. Strong naming conventions
would have to be designed. This may be impossible to enforce.

You really have to think beyond current experiments with a
few hundred individuals, and anticipate what can happen when
this becomes common practice.

Having individuals registered in one single domain, *any*
domain, does not look a good idea. In case that domain were
a top-level domain, it looks like disaster.

-- Eric Wassenaar