The end of domain names?
I have been reading, and greatly enjoying, The Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain this afternoon. His discussion of the generative Internet and the rise of internet appliances that threaten it have made me wonder about the future of domain names. Although the oldest domain name is younger than I am, they have become so embedded in the way we interact with the web that is hard to imagine life without them. But what purpose do domain names server? On the surface the answer seems obvious, domain names allow us to navigate to sites that we want to visit. While you do type in a domain name and up pops the site you want, that’s not the whole picture. A complication to this explanation is that it is possible to visit sites without the use of a domain name. For example, to visit Facebook I could just direct my browser to the IP address 66.220.146.94 and load the site that way. What domain names really do for us is mediate the experience of loading website because facebook.com is easily remembered and share than the IP address 66.whatever is.
So how does the rise of Internet devices like the iPhone and Xbox change this relationship we have with domain names? To keep with the previous example of checking up on friends, Facebook has applications which can run on each device and allow me to log into my account but neither relies on the domain name facebook.com. After downloading the application through the device interface from either Apple or Microsoft one interacts with the Facebook servers through the application itself without ever typing in a domain name. The application, when requesting or sending information to Facebook, is unlike to use the domain names itself for while domain names are easy for people to remember they do add an extra step in the retrieval of information from the web by requiring requests of DNS servers to find the matching IP address to go with a given domain name. Since the easy for people to remember function of domain names isn’t needed in this context, since the end user isn’t interacting in any way with the domain name, it is more efficient for those types of applications to rely just upon IP addresses.
Flipping through my phone just now I see some apps like Facebook and Twitter that I have an relationship with through both the app and the domain name but there are also others which I only have a relationship with the app and who have no domain name presence online. If reliance upon applications as a means for accessing internet content continues to increase then we will see a decrease in the importance of domains names in our interaction with the web (although they are unlikely to ever go away completely.)
There seem to be some positives and negatives to the decreased importance that internet applications place on domain names. There is an argument to be made the security is enhances when I am interacting with a site like Facebook through an application rather than when I am typing, or mistyping, the domain name into an internet browser. While facebok.com, facebook.co and fcebook.com all are owned by Facebook and are being redirected to the correctly spelled site it is easy to imagine a misspelled site representing itself to be the legit site in the hopes of gaining your login information.
On the down side, a decrease in the reliance upon domain names though presents a problem for those seeking a remedy against others that they feel are illegally using their content or name. Currently, a legal injunction or UDRP judgment against the domain name being used by the illegal enterprise are effective because while the sites might still be accessible by ip address relatively few would be aware of what that ip address would be or have the inclination to interact with the site like that. If domains names become less important in our interaction with the web though these tools might become also become less effective. While hosts can suspend accounts, taking down even the IP address version of a site, if a user’s interaction with an illegal entity is taking place through an application they the IP address the application is using could just be updated, creating a seamless experience for the user despite attempts to take the site down.