Retiring Domains

Dave Winer posted an interesting idea regarding retiring websites. In sports, teams and leagues can retire numbers, making them unusable by other players. The player and player’s number always being remembered together.

Dave, suggests that the internet should have a way to retire domains. He equates it to retiring numbers of great players in sports.

When a great baseball or basketball player leaves the game they retire his or her number. That means the jersey hangs from the ceiling, or there’s a plaque at the stadium, and no player on the team ever wears that number again.

His thought arose from the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a wunderkind (I don’t use this word lightly) who brought us some amazing things on the internet, such as creative commons, Reddit, and was highly involved in SOPA.

Retiring a domain is an interesting idea and a challenging technical problem.

Mathematically, retiring players numbers is much more problematic than retiring domain names. In sports, players only have 100 numbers (0 - 99) per team. So, in theory, you could run out of numbers as more become retired. Domains have a 67 character domain name limit, so, it would take longer to run out of domain names than jersey numbers.

A problem with retiring domains is we need to do it immediately on the society contributor’s death. A lot of time had passed when Major League Baseball decided to retire Jackie Robinson’s number. Jackie Robinson’s number wasn’t retired in 1956, when he stopped playing baseball. Mr. Robinson’s number wasn’t retried when he died in 1972. Major League Baseball retired the number 42 in 1997.

This late postmortem retiring doesn’t work well on the Internet. The person’s work needs to be immediately worthy of retirement when they die.

Continuing the baseball analogy, what would happen if another respected player – the first woman baseball player – used the number 42 before it’s retiring?

We could only preserve the domain on the society contributor’s death and before the domain expires. If a corporation or person purchases the domain after the society contributor’s death, could the internet force them to give it up?

Forcing someone to give up a domain seems against what the internet stands for. The Internet is about complete freedom. Aaron fought for these rights. When his domain expires, and someone buys it, would Aaron support the forceful removal of the domain from the owner?

But, who qualifies to be the decision maker? How far does there power extend?

We have ways of preserving the content without retiring the domain. The Internet Archive seems to be a perfect place for Aaron’s contributions. The Internet Archive’s purpose is:

[to] offer permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.

We could fork the content. If Aaron’s essays were in a repository we could create our own copies and distribute them that way. Sharing Aaron’s essays would be like distributing large files over a BitTorrent network. This is a reason everyone’s content should be on Github. On my death, github will still be around, which means my content will still be there, even when this domain expires.

drivingmenuts has an interesting thought on the Hacker News Thread discussing the idea of retiring domains:

Will the internet become littered with millions of permanent monuments to misguided souls, like the little crosses on side of our highways?

Note: I usually call people by their first names after mentioning thier full name in an article. In Jackie Robinson’s case, I couldn’t bring myself to calling him anything other than Mr. Robinson.