Jerry Scharf thinks Chung Ming Shih's clever spin on international domain names is worth at least a pint of suds.
"I'd give this guy a beer," Scharf said upon learning how the service run by the 25-year-old Taiwanese man replaces long homepage addresses with a shorter URL.
Scharf is the executive director of the Internet Software Consortium, which maintains the dominant server software that networks use when a page is requested to find the proper numerical address.
"He's doing something that is certainly against the original intent of [of international country code domains] ... but given all the things I've seen done, this is truly benign," said Scharf. "I see no harm in it whatsoever."
Called Easy.To/Remember, Shih's service – and a few others like it – lets homepage hosts replace a long and ugly Internet address with a more memorable and concise one. The address "http://members.ispnet.com/users/home/johnf," for example, can be replaced with "http://i.am/john."
"I was a user of a free Web service and I forget my own URL often, then I think of this idea," Shih, who also speaks Mandarin and Spanish, wrote in an email. His own easy-to-remember homepage – which lists his single marital status and fondness for silky crooners Celine Dion and Air Supply – is located at [. Page owners can shorten the verbiage of their URL by using Shih's free registration site. Thereafter, the i.am address will redirect traffic from Shih's .am-registered domain to a person's actual homepage. The redirect adds about 1.3 seconds, Shih says, to the time it takes the actual page to load in a standard browser window.
Handling a URL like i.am/Steve depends on Shih's ownership of the i.am domain, which forms the English phrase that naturally comes before a proper name. He also has registered other domains to form variations on the theme: hello.to, messages.to, and a Spanish phrase, pagina.de.
The trick uses the open registry policy of certain national domains. Shih registers his hosts with those countries' national registries and uses a redirect feature in the HTTP protocol to hand off hits when they arrive at his server.
The .am domain is actually the international domain for the country of Armenia. The .to domain (for creating a phrase-address like hello.to/cindy) is for addresses associated with the South Pacific island of Tonga. The policies of those countries let Shih register his host servers – which Shih said are maintained by associates around the globe – without having to be a resident of the country or physically keep his server within its boundaries.
Funding the effort with money from his grandmother, Shih realizes his service cannot handle too many users. "I cannot support all Netizens' [need for] a good address, but a good number of users will benefit [from] it."
"My costs [are] relatively low ... [but with] my family's support and all [my] other Net friends who make this project successful ... a large number of Netizens [can use] this wonderful service."
He said he currently has no plans to charge for the service.
Others do, however. Although Shih said the idea struck him independently, he's aware that he is not alone in his creativity. Several other sites are using variations on the .to domain to provide the phrase-based "URL redirection" service, some for a fee. One with a fee-based offering (as well as a free service) is V3 Redirect Services, based on the domain come.to. Two others are Window.to and Bounce.to.
V3 claims more than 153,000 registered URLs. Shih reports about 40,000 for his service. And Bounce.to, in existence since late last year, is already blaming the increased popularity of the service for a temporary suspension of new names and editing of existing ones. (It plans to return to service within several weeks.)
Of course, these services could face difficulties if the countries whose names on which they rely were to change their domain registration requirements. Scharf was surprised, for example, that Shih was able to register his Spanish phrase domain using Germany's country domain, .de. Germany has been known to be fairly strict, he said, in its requirements for domain registrants.
Domain Misuse?
The domain mechanism behind all these services is sure to raise some eyebrows when it comes to the original purpose of international domains.
"Is [Shih] in any way doing anything wrong?" posited Scharf of the Internet Software Consortium. "No. Do I think it's a little questionable? Yeah – 'am' was a domain designed for people in Armenia to register themselves and somebody got creative. You can't legislate against that."
A much wider deterioration of the Net's naming system is already in progress, Scharf said, and it only shows that a new system is badly needed. "[Domain name] 'org' was for nonprofits. That's no longer the case, just like 'net' used to be for network infrastructure. And that's no longer the case either.
"In my humble opinion, [the less restricted use of such "top-level domains (TLDs)"] is diluting the meaning of what those TLDs have meant so far," he said. "By always tweaking these things around, you're slowly eroding the DNS meaning."
Ironically, Scharf considers the deterioration of the DNS to be good news for those who advocate a replacement system. "If the meaning and value of the DNS is reduced to such a level that bit by bit it becomes less useful, people would migrate to something that is more useful," he said. "We always say the domain name system is not a directory service."](http://i.am/min)
