n recent months, the phrase ''dot-com'' has become synonymous with the very idea of doing business on the Internet. Screaming headlines tell us that ''dot-com'' - or if you are very clever, ''.com'' - is the future of the e-business and the I-economy. To be dot-com is to be young, hip, involved with high-tech, and making a killing on the stock market.
Dot-com is a frenzy being fed by a lot of really strange advertisements and marketing moves. Last year Sun Microsystems began advertising itself as ''the dot in dot-com.'' Now Sun is bringing out a new version of its Solaris Operating System, calling it ''the .com OS.'' According to the company, the new Solaris ''is designed for the .com age.''
Next week the computer industry will flock to Las Vegas again for the Comdex trade show. An advertising campaign currently running in the computer trade press jokes that perhaps the show should be renamed ''.COMdex,'' since there is so much emphasis on the new Internet economy.
Meanwhile, the company originally charged with managing the ''com'' domain, Network Solutions Inc., is trying to make the most of its electronic franchise. Calling itself ''the dot-com people,'' the company's new Web site practically begs visitors to register their own dot-com Web address - for a price of $70 for the first two years.
All of this dot-com stuff got its start in the early 1980s. Only a few hundred computers (we called them ''hosts'') were on the Internet then. Most had names with dashes in them, such as ''MIT-Multics'' and ''MIT-Eddie.'' The address of each computer on the network was stored in a file called ''HOSTS.TXT.'' Whenever a new computer was added to the network, the listing would be added manually to the file. Naturally, as the network grew, it became harder to keep this file up to date.
Realizing that this centralized repository was doomed, the network engineers proposed replacing the HOSTS file with a kind of distributed database. They called this database the domain name system, since it arranged all the computers on the Net into categories called domains. Whether these were typed in capital or lower-case letters didn't matter. The computer MIT-Eddie became the computer ''eddie'' inside the ''mit'' domain. The ''mit'' domain, in turn, was put in the ''edu'' domain, with ''edu'' standing for ''educational.'' So Eddie's new, full name became ''eddie.mit.edu.''
The domain name system - which predates the World Wide Web by nearly a decade - works like a big telephone book. When you type www.boston.com, for example, your computer uses this system to translate the name into an Internet address made up of four numbers separated by periods - in this case, 199.95.74.90. (Eddie's Internet address happens to be 18.62.0.6.) It's these addresses, and not the names, that the Internet's underlying systems use to send messages.
This multilevel system for naming computers on the Internet made sense in the 1980s, and it makes sense today.
So much for history. The problem with all of this is that the dot-com explosion has turned the domain name system on its head. Domain names no longer point to just computers on the Internet; these days, most domain names point to Web pages. More and more companies have multiple dot-com names - one for each product, perhaps, with a few extra thrown in for frequent misspellings of product names.
But dot-com is about more than simply doing business on the Internet. It's really about globalism without global thinking. The whole idea of dot-com was fundamentally flawed, because there is one, and only one, ''dot-com'' domain for the entire planet. Back in the 1980s, this didn't seem like much of a problem for the Internet's fathers. But it has caused a heap of problems in the 1990s, when multiple companies started fighting over the same dot-com addresses. And it's left us with a lot of strangeness.
Consider the ''tower.com'' domain. You would think it might belong to Tower Records, but it actually belongs to Tower Concepts of Oneida, N.Y., which obtained the domain in December 1992. Tower Records didn't wake up to the Internet until May 1995, when it obtained the domain towerrecords.com. More recently, Tower Records has gone on a domain-buying spree, picking up towerkids.com, towersale.com, towereurope.com, towerfranchises.com, and djcrisis.com. (Most of those dot-com addresses don't actually work. At $70 apiece, I can't imagine that Tower's managers care very much.)
There's been a lot of dot-com action in recent months. Although Network Solutions once had a monopoly on the .com, .net and .org domains, you can now sign up with four other companies - the Internet Council of Registrars, Melbourne IT, France Telecom, and Register.com. Theoretically, this should create competition, ultimately producing lower prices and better service. For example, if you go through Net Wizards, which is a member of the Council of Registrars, you can register a domain for bargain-basement $60.
Next year we're likely to see a whole bunch of new top-level domains, including ''.arts'' for culture and entertainment, ''.firm'' for professional firms, ''.info'' for information services, ''.nom'' and ''.per'' for personal home pages, ''.rec'' for recreation, and ''.shop'' for on-line shopping.
The theory is that more domain names will reduce contention in the ''.com'' domain. But I'm not sure that these new domains will work the way that the Internet architects have planned. Certainly Xerox and Sony won't sit by idly while some upstart grabs names such as Xerox.firm or Sony.shop. Meanwhile, I can't believe new companies will be happy being a dot-firm or a dot-shop, when they could be a dot-com.
Technology columnist Simson Garfinkel can be reached at http://chat.simson.net /
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