http://cgscholar.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">cgscholar.com.” This is the domain name for our multimodal web writing platform, Common Ground Scholar. Then sections of digital data are delineated with hierarchical file path syntax: “/community/profiles/william-cope”.

Paul Mockapetris is credited with conceiving the domain name system in 1987.³³ For the next decade, Jon Postel, an academic at UCLA and after that the University of Southern California, managed the domain name system. Since 1998, the singularity of domain names is regulated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a not-for-profit corporation based in Los Angeles.

Underlying the domain name system is a technology dating from 1974, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), where every device connected directly into the internet or a gateway server that connects other devices has an address in the form of a never-to-be-replicated number.³⁴ Domain names are proxies for IP address numbers. The IP address for http://cgscholar.com is “206.221.145.251.”

After reaching cgscholar.com at this address, there are then (in this case) hundreds of thousands of pages, each with its own unique name. After reaching gmail.com, there are one billion accounts, every one accessible via a unique email address.³⁵ Emails sent to <bill.cope@cgnetworks.org> find their way into an inbox at Gmail.

TCP/IP became the standard for all computers on ARPANET,^§AS1.4.7e the network of research computers whose development had been funded by the US Department of Defense. All these computers were set to work on TCP/IP as of January 1, 1983.³⁶ Since 1986, the internet has been “governed,” to use an anachronistic term, by the Internet Engineering Task Force, a not-for-profit, voluntary coalition of experts who develop technical standards via a process quaintly called “Request for Comments.” Says one of its founders, David Clark, “We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”³⁷

Never before has there been a singular system of proper naming that operates across all languages, all states, all forms of meaning. This is a unique creature of the universe of digitized meanings.

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³³ Paul V. Mockapetris, 1987, “Domain Names: Concepts and Facilities,” Network Working Group (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034 ).

³⁴ Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn 1974, “A Protocol for Packet Network Inter-communication,” IEEE Trans. Comm. Tech. COM-22(V5):627–41.

³⁵ http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/gmail-statistics/

³⁶ Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry G. Roberts, and Stephen Wolff, 2009, “A Brief History of the Internet,” SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 39(5):22–31; Ulysees Black, 2000, Internet Architecture: An Introduction to IP Protocols, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

³⁷ Paul Hoffman, 2012, “The Tao of Ietf: A Novice’s Guide to the Internet Engineering Task Force”: Internet Engineering Task Force. (www.ietf.org/tao.html ).

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 93-94. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

URLs and TCP/IP §MS1.1.1f