US Domain -- County Delegations

Fri Jul 28 07:14:11 UTC 1995

On Fri, 28 Jul 1995, Nicolas Williams wrote:

> Think about it: if IBM wants IBM.COM, rather than IBM.COM.NY.US, then
> let them buy the right to register a name in the .COM hierarchy, but
> they should pay more for that than for a name in the COM.NY.US.
> Seriously, in the long run, many services will be tradeable as
> comodities in futures markets;

In Canad we have an agricultural commodity known as "quota" which is sold 
on the open market. There are provincial marketing boards, like the 
Ontario Milk Marketing Board, which have set a quota on the number of 
litres of raw milk that may be produced by farmers in the province. This 
annual quota is divided up and allocated to farmers. Originally it was a 
cheap thing to get, but you could only get so much quota. If your herd 
produced 400 gallons a day and the board would only issue you with 300 
gallons of quota, you could dump the milk, sell the cows, feed the milk 
to pigs, but you could not sell that milk, period.

So some farmers figured out that it was worth a considerable sum to buy 
quota from other farmers and that they could make money by increasing 
their dairy herds to the carrying capacity of their farms. Nowadays it is 
not unusual for quota to be sold for the value of 2 years production 
which means the farmer doesn't start to make money on the quota for two 
years.

Nobody intended for this to happen, but it did happen. If the INternic 
does not loosen up the bonds on top level domains it will happen in this 
industry too. I think top level domains should be issued like the FCC 
issues frequencies. Some should be free like .COM, .NET, .ORG and some 
should be auctioned off like .PSI, .MCS, .NETCOM, .UUNET etc. Hold an 
auction for three top level domains to the highest bidder. Winners get to 
choose their name greater than 2 characters (ISO 3166) and less than 8 
characters. Next year auction off another three. At each auction, issue a 
few free toplevels as well.

How many companies would pay to have yourname.msn for their domain name?

> what I propose does have one sticky point: who should charge for the
> registration services and what is to be done with that money; any
> ideas?

ISOC should do this. Hand over the Internic to ISOC, get them to charge a 
small fee for transactions that will cover all expenses plus allow for 
improvements in registry and directory services such as using modern 
database technology to manage the system.

> come up with unique two-level names; it is quite feasible to have domain
> name servers for hundreds of thousands of names in one hierarchy, those
> who say it isn't are either lazy or incompetent or don't know what they
> are talking about (and I'm talking about good, reliable, fast servers
> here).

Modern database technology on striped disk arrays can handle the entire 
world's population using a 1 level domain; pick a number between 1 and 6 
billion.

Michael Dillon                                    Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc.                                 Fax: +1-604-542-4130
http://www.memra.com                             E-mail: michael at memra.com