RFC 2345 (rfc2345) - Page 2 of 14
Domain Names and Company Name Retrieval
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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
[RFC 1591].
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