[salud] Domain names as <provider> values

[[e-mail] (Dale R. Worley)]

[as an author]

Let's look at the going back to using only domain names as <provider>
values.

Barry Lieba suggests that we can get that version of the proposal
approved by the URN people.

Revising the text will be straightforward.

In a sense, using bare domain names is no different than using domain
names qualified with dates:  The person who defines a new private-name
must be aware of the private-names that have previously been created
using the same provider value.

The advantage of date-qualified providers is that an organization that
has just acquired a domain name can create a provider value using
today's date, and that provider is guaranteed to not have yet been
used to create a private-name, because it cannot have been used before
today.

On the other hand, it is not difficult to acquire a domain name that
has not been used before.  I did DNS searches for random domain names
under .COM.  It turns out that most 4-letter domain names have been
registered, but very few of the 5-letter domain names (as a proportion
of the total number that are possible) have been registered.  I looked
at random domain names under .DE and got similar results.  (I chose
.DE because it is the most popular two-letter TLD that I know of that
allows second-level names to be registered.)  So if an organization
wants a short, new domain name to register to use for private-names,
they can probably construct one from some abbreviation of their
company's name.

Dale