Zoning the Web?

In general, you will find me absent from, or at least at the end of, the line of people who look to government to influence, let alone manage, the lives of citizens. However, from time to time I suppose it is necessary for private sector busybodies and the bureaucracy to provide direction in an attempt to effect a greater good and keep the riots out of the streets so the traffic can keep moving.

To this end I would like to propose "Internet Zoning" as an organizing principle for new domain registries.

This thought occurred to me as I found myself dealing with the advent of my children discovering the Web as an alternative to TV and the local library. Curious minds doing the expected will run into increasingly questionable material especially as they are increasingly awash in hormones. Yes, you guessed it, the porn sites have Dad worried. I'm no prude, but that does not mean I am beyond resurrecting Victorian arguments to insist that my children are prudes for as far beyond the age of majority as I can possibly influence them.

To that end, I find the "tools" that have been developed to manage the "Net" exploits of children far from meeting the challenge. This is because the tools depend on either (a) specific registration of the site reference so it can be blocked or (b) the clever filtering of subject material terms. Such tools do an inadequate job of preventing kids from getting to the home page of such sites. Once there, the damage is done. Yes, most sites put up the obligatory "be 18 or be gone" but what a child can see before they even enter a site is just not acceptable.

Back to my point. Every community attempts to organize itself through "zoning" regulations that focus the many variations of human activity into appropriate locations. The "adult" content offered by the pornography industry is generally herded into some specific part of a city which becomes known by euphemisms such as "the red-light district" in Amsterdam or "the combat zone" in Boston. In New York City it's even referred to by specific location, "42nd Street". If you're looking for that kind of thing, that's where you go.

But let's not limit the concept to just the pornographic. Zoning attempts to organize all manner of activities. Every town has a shopping area and "the mall" for retail activities. Light industry congregates somewhere between commercial and heavy industrial land use and there are an array of residential formats intended to prevent apartment buildings from being constructed in the middle of single family homes.

Our communities are comfortably familiar and this serves many purposes including commercial ones. Look around: If you want fast food, try to find a McDonald's without some other burger joint within view of it. Need gas? Try to find a gas station that does not have another one nearby. Certain retail shops only place themselves in malls; they are never found elsewhere. In most places, if you're looking for a new car, every major brand can be found at dealers within a few blocks of each other ­ and yes, the used cars are near them also.

Why does this happen? Why does Wendy's want to be near McDonald's? Because that's where the buyers are.

The Internet, for better and worse, is a community. It has expanded beyond the communities of government and academia from which it originated, and has grown beyond the community of computer cognoscenti who seem intent on claiming and managing it as their exclusive province. Regrets to all who pioneered this infrastructure, but the plain and simple fact is it now belongs to everyone. From corporations to soccer moms, Bubbas to brain surgeons, we all walk this neighborhood together. Just as real estate zoning attempts (with no shortage of debate and rancor) to bring order to the physical world, Internet zoning would similarly attempt to bring familiarity, predictability and, yes, control to the digital world.

We can bring a similar level of expected activities through better use of expanded generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) classifications. Today there are five Top Level Domains (TLDs), .gov, .edu, .net, .org and .com. The last three are considered gTLD's.

Clearly, the Internet is in dire need of a more robust nomenclature. The period of 1996 to 1997 saw the number of new name registrations more than double to 1.5 million. Names ending with .com accounted for 90% of these new registrations. This level of growth is expected to continue for some time to come as Internet activity in the rest of the world accelerates. If the majority of growth continues to slot into the .com gTLD, the Net becomes a vast Yellow Pages with only one section. For those who believe this is not a problem because these Yellow Pages run on computers I say, "keep dreamin."

So what would Internet zoning look like? I'm not sure, but I do believe the concept should be included in the debate on TLD expansion. Issues to consider: who will manage name registration and should these names exist as trademarks. Perhaps such zoning could be accommodated within the .com gTLD.

Minimally, the dad in me would like to see the pornography industry voluntarily move over to a zone such as .prn or .com+prn. It makes the things immensely easier to filter and it consolidates the product for the consumer who is looking for it. It also makes it far easier to deal with the rogue company on the wrong side of the virtual street.

If you have a consumer product to sell, point to the shopping district, perhaps .rtl for retail. The entertainment group might be .ent. Here is where you'll find such things as ticket outlets, WebRadio and the Digital TV (DTV) feed.

Some enterprises may have to exist in more than one classification. Disney is an example of a company that has retail outlets in malls around the country, movies, stage shows and resort attractions. They live within the confines of zones in the real world and even heartily subscribe to zoning within their own properties. Just try and get a cold beer in the Magic Kingdom! Disney.rtl would no doubt have links to Disney.ent. Disney.com may well continue as the site to go to if you need the company's contract terms for doing business with them.

As the Internet continues to evolve, zoning could also play a role in how infrastructure allocation and features are deployed for optimum use. In the physical world, a heavy industrial user may have a greater need for supplies of water, sewer and electricity than a light industrial user. Bigger pipes and wires service this need. In the Internet zoning example, certain domain classifications may have need of bigger bandwidth or perhaps a different architecture.

The dialogue to date, conducted by the National Science foundation, has focused on who should operate domain registration. Should it continue to be a single company (Network Solutions) or should it be opened to competition? If opened to competition, should each company be allowed a single TLD responsibility as we expand TLDs? And, should domain names be treated and defended as trademarks?

While there has been discussion of expanding TLDs (generic or otherwise), the discussion about how new ones would be used gets lost in the noise of who would be responsible for them and how much money they could make doing it. Little is said about the role and purpose of new TLDs. "We just need more of them," seems to be the hallmark of the forces for expansion.

"They" are about to change the neighborhood. If you're concerned about this don't wait too long to be heard. Until the Internet is better managed, I'm not trusting leaky software to keep my kids out of the wrong places. They'll just have to surf with dad.