Unique identifiers
Domains are unique identifiers. If you own radio.garden, no one else can. There are many other unique identifiers: IP addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, SSNs, license plates, credit card numbers, ISBNs, bar codes, dollar bill serial numbers, human fingerprints. Each of these is not like the other: what’s actually inside a unique identifier defines what information and value it holds.
Like, you couldn’t sell an IP address for 70 million dollars. Your home address may have a certain cachet, but it’s not the address itself that’s valuable—it’s the home, the land, the neighborhood. Your domain name doesn’t imply your location, but your phone number does. It doesn’t much matter what license plate the DMV issues you...unless you add semantic meaning with a vanity plate, which really changes things.
It turns out there can be a lot of information embedded in unique identifiers. Deidre Mask wrote a whole book1, The Address Book—amazing title, btw—exploring “What street addresses reveal about identity, race, wealth, and power.”
That they are unique and memorable is the whole point of domain names. Domains are easy-to-remember nicknames for IP addresses. And when you attach meaningful words to identifiers, people will pay money for them. No two domains are exactly alike. An economist would call that an “economic singularity,” like an oil painting or a movie or the rights to Taylor Swift’s masters recordings, which she bought back from a private equity firm a year ago this month2. As Milton Mueller wrote in his book Ruling the Root,
No two words or symbols mean exactly the same thing. Hence, no two identifiers are perfectly good substitutes for each other in an economic sense. (21)
When it’s important that multiple people can’t claim the same identifier, you need a centralized authority to police things. That authority for domains is ICANN. To share the internet, everyone needs to agree that the ICANN-supervised list of domain names is the one and only list (called “the root”). But everyone hasn’t always agreed.
In 2001, a VC-backed startup named New.net created an alternative root, or “alt root.” They created a handful of new top-level domains, like .shop, .chat, .kids, and .xxx. New.net was a serious threat to ICANN: at one point 20% of internet service providers in the US routed to those alternate domains. And even though they ultimately failed, they pushed ICANN to change. All four of those extensions I mentioned are now TLDs in ICANN’s root (and not without controversy—.xxx is for porn). Other alt roots rolled out IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names, i.e. using non-Latin scripts), and since then ICANN has dedicated resources to delegating its own IDNs. Then there are alt roots controlled by governments of authoritarian countries that want to limit communication to their own intranet. This phenomenon—the risk of the global internet fragmenting—is sometimes referred to by its catchy nickname, “The Splinternet.”
Identifiers like domains are invented out of thin air, with nothing much tied to them in meatspace (unlike your home address, say). And yet, when you give an identifier semantic meaning, things get artistic, commercial, and political. Someone will file a lawsuit over nissan.com, someone will pay $15 million for chat.com, and someone will register rotatingsandwiches.com to settle the is-a-taco-a-sandwich debate once and for all.
Footnotes
(1) A whole book? About addresses? Or domains...That’s one reaction I get (or infer based on body language) when I tell people what I’m writing about. But there’s so much depth in seemingly narrow topics! I like exploring that depth of the everyday things under our nose.
(2) Thanks and credit to Thomas Clowes for pointing me toward his paper on The economics of domain names (2016) and Lucien Karpik’s 2010 book, Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities.