The Internet seems to be turning me into a bad parent.
I love my daughter, of course, and my wife and I take care of her the best we can. But such quaint affection is merely evidence of our outdated, old-fashioned approach to raising a child. Clearly, we’re falling out of step with the fast moving pace of modern parenting.
Why would I say that? Because oh, the shame! our daughter has no domain name.
It seems that babies born at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, Calif., are given their very own domain name within hours of their birth. The tech news Web site SiliconValley.com reports that the hospital has entered a deal with Namezero.com to provide a free personal Web address for one year long enough, the company hopes, to convince them they can’t do without it for $30 a year afterward.
When our daughter Reilly was born, the hospital gave us a little plastic diaper bag stuffed with diapers, pacifiers and other plastic doodads but no domain name. Now I feel like someone who bought a new PC just before the latest version of Windows came out. Our child is just 15 months old and already she’s obsolete.
Until recently, we thought Reilly was perfectly adapted to the modern world. She has her own Web site, a collection of photos and clumsy HTML I cobbled together to keep friends and relatives up to speed on her ever-advancing cuteness. I also capture her antics on a digital video camera and edit the footage into short films on my home PC. I figured she was on the cusp of the online revolution, a 21st century baby born to ride a digital wave to a bright and unlimited future.
But alas, her Web site is hidden away behind the arcane URL of my Internet service provider, a domain name entirely lacking in cachet. And with more than 30 million domain names already in use, it’s likely that the perfect name for her personal home page will be long gone by the time she’s old enough to realize our mistake.
A spokeswoman for VeriSign, a company that sells domain names and maintains an online address book, told SiliconValley.com that personalized domain names could someday become as important as a birth certificate. “Some people even look at them as a family heirloom they can pass down,” she said.
If you ask me, it ought to be illegal for companies to make this kind of pitch to parents we’re way too vulnerable. We’ve already started saving for Reilly’s college education, upped our life insurance and paid a company to keep blood from her umbilical cord in a freezer somewhere on the off chance it might do her some good someday. Now I’m supposed to feel guilty because she doesn’t have a Web site in her own name? It’s just not fair.
If other hospitals pick up on this trend, I can imagine a future society with classes of people divided not by ethnicity or income, but by the quality of their personal domain names. Those whose parents set them up early with a sweet-sounding URL will get into the best schools, attend all the right parties and be privileged enough to piss away the first 40 years of their lives and still become president of the United States a few years later.
As for the rest: They’ll be slaving away in some tech-support call center, spending their off-hours in plain text chat rooms asking people to come visit them at their lame, government-issued URLs. Is this the kind of future you want for your child?
I recognize that I’m probably making too much out of this. If Reilly grows up to be an unemployed felon or, worse yet, a television news anchor, I’ll know it had more to do with my own failings as a parent rather than her lack of a snappy domain name. But if we have another baby, we’ll be headed to Redwood City just in case.
To contact syndicated columnist Joe Salkowski, you can e-mail him at [email protected] or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.
