Carl Hewitt: What is the lifetime of a namespace that might be owned by an organization?

{Ed: At this point there was discussion about a company lasting 13 years, 40 years, 100 years...}

Larry Masinter: It's not a storage cost issue.  If the problem is storing URLs.  We have storage.  Paper by Michael Lest At the current rate of disk and tape storage size growth, storage will soon exceed the total amount of everything written in history.  A/D will always kill storage - just add another x-bits of resolution. Fidelity of recording can always improve. We need storage infrastructure to fix dangling URLs.

There are method of preservation and organization, but how do you make reference to archive and find the prominent name.  It's wrong to save everything.  Examples: CGI generated pages that can generate infinite pages. People should capture what's going through their proxy.  People should copy and archivally store what is used.  Things that are used are likely to be referenced in the future.

To the main point. When we talk about Internet scale naming.  You'd better include time in the scale.  We need URL's plus time-stamping.

Mark Kosters(?): Times come from a namespace - changes over the time.  Reference to something that doesn't exist?  Why?

Larry Masinter: Do you believe in Santa Claus?

Steve Holtz: err.. yes?

Larry Masinter: I'm sorry, but Santa Claus does not exist. Santa Claus is a well known name for an entity that does not exist. Abstract concept is a list.  Associated.  More from reference than the actually document.

Carl Hewitt: Extra added value for pages that storage indices. WWW is referencing less and less on the web.  There are references to names that don't exist.

Michael Gorlick: Library of Alexandria - References to documents that don't exist are tremendously valuable to scholars.

{Ed: Notes become fragmentary at this point.  There was some discussion about tolls and trolls, but the context for this example has been lost.}

Carl Hewitt: is there a troll getting a toll?

A: There is a fundamental incentive for doing so.