We have had and are having discussions about prefix safe:// or the .safenet extension. In this discussion there have been some different opinions although safe:// seems to be most prefered so far. However both sides have the same reason but different conclusions. Both sides want to maximize widespread and fast adoption of safenet.
Since everyone is in such agreement for fast adoption I would like to point out that the surest way to achieve this is to allow present websites to easily have a safe version of their current web prescense. Content is king, and although new services and new sites will emerge as a consecuence of safenet a fast way for widespread adoption is simply that present players on the web will have also a safenet version. This would in itself both market and explain safenet with no other effort, the existing sites would adapt and inform their users of the fact that they now also field a safenet version of themselves.
To get to this very favourable situation we must consider that for a present website the URL they have today is marketing money already spent and brand awareness already paid for. Any existing site today would be much faster to also make a safe version of their site if they can retain their present URL. Any descision that invloves spending money for new brand awareness creation is a way less fast to make for a business than to get extra revenue for something their users already know, money already spent.
Thus we should keep in mind that if a present company that has http://www.service.com today and that can register the adress safe://www.service.com is far more likely to make a safe version fast. If they dont get a safe adress that is the same they will wait far longer before they do a safe vesion of their web prescense. And safenet stands to win alot by getting present web sites to make a safe version, it would help imensely in mass adoption.
I would even suggest we consider to allow the ā.ā in the safename you can register. This way the site www.news.com could register the safename news.com and then they would have both http://www.news.com and safe://www.news.com
I think that would be an elegant way to allow for safe://www.news.com but still not block the entire .com ending on the entire safenet for just one user. So you should be able to register patrik.com or patrik.se as the safe public id.
If this is techically complicated I dont know, but it seems it would be nothing. Just allow a public id to include the character . and we would get a much faster adaptation from present sites and free marketing for safenet.
I agree I made a similar point as the familiarity of .com .edu .gov etcetera will help not only give some clarity as to what youāre visiting but make the users feel more comfortable.
I am glad you agree Nigel. I live in Sweden, and here a company markets a website called reseguiden.se. They would be a good example to illutrate this point. It is a site for finding places to visit on holidays and one can see them advertise on public buses, television and the like. This site would obviously not easily decide to make a safe version of itself if they did not manage to own the safe://reseguiden.se and they will never market anything else than the URL that works in an ordinary broswer. But I am sure they realize that some who look for places to go on holiday would prefer to do so in complete anonymity, be it from the wife or whatever. Thus, given that they manage to register the exact copy of what the already advertise today, that would be safe://reseguiden.se, then they would be far more likely to make a safe version of their site.
And if they did make a safe version of their site that would then contribute to the Safenet awareness offcourse. Just by having a little notice on their present site that they also exist on safenet or even a small notice on the bus adverts that their site name also exists on safe, would be very beneficial for Safenets adaptation.
Seeing as this is an easy thing for us to consider and perhaps a non issue techiccally. One should really be able to register a public Safe Id that is āreseguiden.seā.
This would speed up adaptaion immensly by actually piggybacking on marketing money already being spent out there.
Exactly just like at the bottom of a blog or whatever corporate site you see ālike or share us onā Facebook/Twitter/Google+ and hopefully in the future visit us on The SafeNetwork!
Those within the top1m Alexa websites over a reasonable period, tends towards half million domains.
The option I suggested before was to allow owners to post a hidden .txt file to the top of their domainā¦ something like .safe-registration.txt containing a given code, would prove they own that domain and allow for some process that sees them pay a reduced fee or that they are gifted those domains.
So, I would come along, see the opportunity request a code that is time limited and post that as proof that I was the owner wanting to adopt a safe:// equivalent.
This would avoid url trolls and other greedy interests maximises a bad rap for safenet clashes and perhaps a quick win reasonable route to raising money for maidsafe over the medium term.
Yes, perhaps we should even go that far. But before even that. If one today advertises āpatrik.seā it should at least be possible to register āpatrik.seā on safe and not having to register āseā on safe and thereby blocking the entire swedish top domain.
If one makes it possible to have the character ā.ā in a public Safe ID that would be solved. Just make it allowed to have the character ā.ā in the public Safe ID as long as its not the first char and we would be set. Or am I missing something?
Sounds neat, but ONLY if itās an OPTIONAL feature.
So people can optionally put .com .org etc if they like, but we definitely shouldnāt make it mandatory, and need to keep the default safe://content option available because itās great for users
But yeah, if itās just optional, I definitely think it would be great for adoption.
Advertising companies could still advertise their regular company.com, and add a little button that says (visit us on SAFE) kinda like (purchase us on the App Store / Google Play) like you see today
Given the small spread of top level domains on clearnet .com .net .co.uk etc, I expect it would be simple to reserve those, though it adds a trivial complication it might be one worthwhile doing.
I also had that idea: if someone has already http://foo.bar, that he can also register safe:foo.bar, if requested. With .bar an already existing top-level domain, like .com or .us (ps: what about .co.uk?).
Maybe there was already a discussion in the past on this forum about a mechanism to realise something like that. Or why it is not possible or desirable. I donāt know.
Here some ideas after some brainstorming:
The idea of @davidpbrown, if Iāve understand it correctly:
Do a request in a Safe āregister-appā to get safe://foo.bar and get a code id back.
Click āregisterā in the Safe āregister-appā and then somewhere there is going to be a check if the correct code id is in http://foo.bar/maidsafe_registration.txt. If that is the case: the domain name safe://foo.bar is registered to your Safe account.
I think this approach has some disadvantages like:
Your site can be hacked and the hacker can do the Safe registration. How to undo this afterwards?
Following the Safe principle: the check will probably be done by ārandomā decentralized group member nodes or something like that. Can these access http://foo.bar/maidsafe_registration.txt? There can be a firewall in the way.
I have another idea how to realise this:
Create a registration-āgroupā of e.g. 10 Safe accounts for e.g. top-level domain ā.comā . Only members of that group can register a .com domain. I hope something like this is possible.
Give a couple of these accounts to the party responsible for the current clearnet registration (e.g. ICANN for .net). Let them to the registration with these accounts: I find it logical that it is the same party who does the registration of the http: and safe: domain name. That is an āatomicā operation. Then there is never a dispute which registration was first in case of 2 different parties registrating. They already have the contact info of the current domain owners, e.g. ICANN Lookup.
If one of those registration accounts is hacked, it should be possible to remove the hacked account from the group, if a majority of the members of the group agrees. To be clear this is a āmanualā operation. Maybe it should also be possible to create a new member account to replace it.
This is all an unnecessary complication. Storm in a teacup.
It is not necessary to have identical names in the Safe namespace in order for an existing site to use it. The implication is that http://facebook.com would be deterred from using SAFEnet if they canāt have safe://facebook.com. What bullshit.
On Tor, they already have https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/, a vanity address generated probably with Shallot. If they could only have a completely pseudo-random string for a name then the argument might have some bit of value, but it doesnāt.
Iām suggesting this would only be for the top ~500k sites in Alexa or similar. Unlikely many of those not under proper ownership and perhaps itās a risk that we can only do so much aboutā¦ coupled with another layer of confirmation, such as confirmation via an email on that domain; I donāt see it being a problem.
Denying reality, doesnāt change itā¦ most companies and a lot of people, do seem to value identity and control over their brand. If the vanity address exists, then those interested in using SAFE will pursue those. Better them than the greed shisters who will look to make an early grab without contributing anything of value.
That is another good point that perhaps the [publicurl].topleveldomain should see those publicurls as names reservedā¦ at least for a while.
Better that maidsafe gets the value from that, than random botmeisters. Also, it might be opportunity for easy publicity, so long as the fee for those domains is functional and not extortion.
Thereās an unlimited number of such names: Facebook could have generated any number of them, which eliminates the incentive for anyone else to squat them, since only one would lead to the Facebook site. You simply donāt see that happening, which is the actual reality.
Twitter can get safe://twitter
Facebook if itās still around can get safe://facebook or safe://facebook.com - though I think the former type is likely the one everyone would prefer.
I prefer this idea of whiteoutmashups that the name is more important than the topleveldomain on clearnet and perhaps thatās the difference youāre suggestingā¦
The issue with single name like safe://twitter would be where there is overlap of top level domain but from what Iāve seen of them not looking for that, within the top 500k most visited sites - excluding the flybynight churn, there are not conflicting ownerships like that.
Incidentally, the daily Alexa top 1m .zip file, still seems to be at http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip and its only those that are stable and long living in that which I expect should be considered for mapping to safe://
Maybe it would make sense to integrate a ā.ā so its easier to remember names. But thinking about it im not sure what we would actually gain. Probably worthwhile to further think about this or other possibilities to make it easier to remember site, maybe with some familiarity regarding the structure.
But your general assumption that everyone wants as many already existing sites as possible to join the safenet is wrong. I for instance dont care whether facebook or google or twitter join the safenet. I do want safenet to be as easily accessible as possible, but for me theres no point in trying to get the worst of all clearnet magnates on my/our net.
Now everyone can ofc try to get whatever clearnet site they want to join the network (im gonna do the same), but giving anyone an advantage, especially some arbitrary companies, is out of the question for me.
Yes, itās a fair point. I think the interest in this is only acknowledging that from brands follows a fktonne of money, absurd as that is. Choice is whether itās just left as a free for all where domain name trolling would occur or seeing Maidsafe capitalising on it to encouraged industry understanding of the opportunity for them.
I suspect this is where marketing will consider multiple audience interests and this one fall towards the interests of companies not individuals.
My instinct for marketing is to see it done as simply as possible - selling name-space for a nominal fee would be uncontroversial and perhaps better than potentially its alt-traditional hype to get the same footprint.
One other possible solution might be to make SAFE āDNSā more DNS-like and restructure it to use an arbitrary hierarchy of labels instead of the two-level <service name>.<public name> system that weāre using now and to represent each level with possibly separate SDs so that each can have a different set of owners. As an example, deeply nested domain names are often used by universities for their different colleges/departments, so University X might have a SAFEsite with a domain name like robotics.cs.engin.ux, where ux is a label managed by the university as a whole, engine.ux is controlled by the engineering college, cs.engin.ux is controlled by the CS department of the engineering college, and robotics.cs.engin.ux is managed directly by the robotics lab in the CS department of the engineering college.
What this would allow us to do is to pre-register all of the existing TLDs just before the official launch of the network and to hand them off to ICANN, and ICANN can manage distributing ownership of their subdomains to the people the same way that they do now on the clearnet. This doesnāt stop people from registering SAFEsites like safe://facebook or safe://google, but no-one will be able to register safe://facebook.com or safe://google.com without ICANNās approval since they have control over the com TLD. The outcome of all of this is that anyone can still register their own names by themselves as long as they donāt happen to be existing TLDs, and any names which currently exist on the clearnet can still be managed the same way that they have been.
(sorry about the accidental partial post; I think I accidentally hit Tab-Space when writing)
Arenāt we all marketing? Theres no central figure, at least there shoulsnāt be one, right?
Im pretty sure there needs to be some economics/maths to regulate the registration process for public sites. But Maidsafe shouldnt be the ones selling anything. It needs to be integrated into the network. It needs to be decentralised.
Itās the same problem I think. There must not be a central entity at all imo. It also seems quite arbitrary to me to use any already existing TLDs.
But I like your suggestion regarding DNS. Unfortunately I donāt know what thoughts the devs or other ppl have already had about it. I know dirvine has thought about it in one way or another, not sure if it was about marketing or usability or whatnot.
