The Information - James Gleick [188]
A useful term of art emerged from computer science: namespace, a realm within which all names are distinct and unique. The world has long had namespaces based on geography and other namespaces based on economic niche. You could be Bloomingdale’s as long as you stayed out of New York; you could be Ford if you did not make automobiles. The world’s rock bands constitute a namespace, where Pretty Boy Floyd and Pink Floyd and Pink coexist, along with the 13th Floor Elevators and the 99th Floor Elevators and Hamadryad. Finding new names in this space becomes a challenge. The singer and songwriter long called simply “Prince” was given that name at birth; when he tired of it, he found himself tagged with a meta-name, “the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” The Screen Actors Guild maintains a formal namespace of its own—only one Julia Roberts allowed. Traditional namespaces are overlapping and melting together. And many grow overcrowded.
Pharmaceutical names are a special case: a subindustry has emerged to coin them, research them, and vet them. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration reviews proposed drug names for possible collisions, and this process is complex and uncertain. Mistakes cause death. Methadone, for opiate dependence, has been administered in place of Metadate, for attention-deficit disorder, and Taxol, a cancer drug, for Taxotere, a different cancer drug, with fatal results. Doctors fear both look-alike errors and sound-alike errors: Zantac/Xanax; Verelan/Virilon. Linguists devise scientific measures of the “distance” between names. But Lamictal and Lamisil and Ludiomil and Lomotil are all approved drug names.
In the corporate namespace, signs of overcrowding could be seen in the fading away of what might be called simple, meaningful names. No new company could be called anything like General Electric or First National Bank or International Business Machines. Similarly, A.1. Steak Sauce could only refer to a food product with a long history. Millions of company names exist, and vast sums of money go to professional consultants in the business of creating more. It is no coincidence that the spectacular naming triumphs of cyberspace verge on nonsense: Yahoo!, Google, Twitter.
The Internet is not just a churner of namespaces; it is also a namespace of its own. Navigation around the globe’s computer networks relies on the special system of domain names, like COCA-COLA.COM. These names are actually addresses, in the modern sense of that word: “a register, location, or a device where information is stored.” The text encodes numbers; the numbers point to places in cyberspace, branching down networks, subnetworks, and devices. Although they are code, these brief text fragments also carry the great weight of meaning in the most vast of namespaces. They blend together features of trademarks, vanity license plates, postal codes, radio-station call letters, and graffiti. Like the telegraph code names, anyone could register a domain name, for a small fee, beginning in 1993. It was first come, first served. The demand exceeds the supply.
Too much work for short words. Many entities own “apple” trademarks, but there is only one APPLE.COM; when the domains of music and computing collided, so did the Beatles and the computer company. There is only one MCDONALDS.COM, and a journalist named Joshua Quittner registered it first. Much as the fashion empire of Giorgio Armani wanted ARMANI.COM, so did Anand Ramnath Mani of Vancouver, and he got there first. Naturally a secondary market emerged for trade in domain