As children, we were told that names could not affect us. Words were not instruments of power; sticks and stones were. "What's in a name?" Shakespeare scoffed. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." As we grew up, though, we learned better. The act of naming, or controlling the assignation of names, in fact confers mastery as well as requiring it, as authorities like God, Linnaeus and the Japanese government apparently knew all along. Now another dispute over names -- Internet domain names, to be precise -- is proving once again the link between nomenclature and power.
Last November, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (the nonprofit group that took over responsibility for the Internet from the U.S. government in 1998) approved the addition of seven new top-level domain names -- .info, .pro, .name, .biz, .aero, .coop and .museum -- to the current seven, which include .com and .gov, and the two-letter country names such as jp for Japan. In late June, .info and .biz were launched, and last week .name got off the ground. Registrations for all three start this month, and users may be able to access them as early as September.
One would have thought this was an all-around good thing. Given that commercial names were being used up as fast as dot-com hopefuls could type them in (of the 35 million registered domains in the world right now, 22 million are .com names), .biz would appear to provide a sorely needed alternative. And who could complain about .info and .name, both of which were designed to give individuals and families a chance to acquire a top-level domain?