Domain Names and Company Name Retrieval
RFC 2345
Document | Type |
RFC - Experimental
(May 1998; No errata)
Was draft-klensin-tld-whois (individual)
|
|
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Authors | Gary Oglesby , Ted Wolf , John Klensin | ||
Last updated | 2013-03-02 | ||
Stream | Legacy | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
Stream | Legacy state | (None) | |
Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
RFC Editor Note | (None) | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 2345 (Experimental) | |
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | (None) | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Network Working Group J. Klensin Request for Comments: 2345 MCI Category: Experimental T. Wolf Dun & Bradstreet G. Oglesby MCI May 1998 Domain Names and Company Name Retrieval Status of this Memo This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1998). All Rights Reserved. Abstract Location of web information for particular companies based on their names has become an increasingly difficult problem as the Internet and the web grow. The use of a naming convention and the domain name system (DNS) for that purpose has caused complications for the latter while not solving the problem. While there have been several proposals to use contemporary, high-capability, directory service and search protocols to reduce the dependencies on DNS conventions, none of them have been significantly deployed. This document proposes a company name to URL mapping service based on the oldest and least complex of Internet directory protocols, whois, in order to explore whether an extremely simple and widely-deployed protocol can succeed where more complex and powerful options have failed or been excessively delayed. 1. Introduction and Context In recent months, there have been many discussions in various segments of the Internet community about "the top level domain problem". Perhaps characteristically, that term is used by different groups to identify different, and perhaps nearly orthogonal, issues. Those issues include: Klensin, et. al. Experimental [Page 1] RFC 2345 Domain Names and Company Name Retrieval May 1998 1.1. A "domain administration policy" issue. 1.2. A "name ownership" issue, of which the trademark issue may constitute a special case. 1.3. An information location issue, specifically the problem of locating the appropriate domain, or information tied to a domain, for an entity given the name by which that entity is usually known. Of these, controversies about the first two may be inevitable consequences of the growth of the Internet. There have been intermittent difficulties with top level domain adminstration and various attempts to use the domain registry function as a mechanism for control of service providers or services from time to time since a large number of such domains started being allocated. Those problems led to the publication of the policy guidelines of [RFC1591]. The third appears to be largely a consequence of the explosive growth of the World Wide Web and, in particular, the exposure of URL formats [URL] to the end user because no other mechanisms have been available. The absence of an appropriate and adequately-deployed directory service has led to the assumption that it should be possible to locate the web pages for a company by use of a naming convention involving that company's name or product name, i.e., for the XYZ Company, a web page located at http://www.xyz.com/ or http://www.xyz-company.com/ has been assumed. However, as the network grows and as increasing numbers of web sites are rooted in domains other than ".COM", this convention becomes difficult to sustain: there will be too many organizations or companies with legitimate claims --perhaps in different lines of business or jurisdictions-- to the same short descriptive names. For that reason, there has been a general sense in the community for several years that the solution to this information location problem lies, not in changes to the domain name system, but in some type of directory service. But such directory services have not come into being. There has been ongoing controversy about choices of protocols and accessing mechanisms. IETF has published specifications for several different directory and search protocols, including [WHOIS++], [RWHOIS], Klensin, et. al. Experimental [Page 2] RFC 2345 Domain Names and Company Name Retrieval May 1998 [LDAP], [X500], [GOPHER]. One hypothesis about why this has not happened is that these mechanisms have been hard to select and deploy because they are much more complex than is necessary. This document proposes an extremely simple alternative.Show full document text