US Domain -- County Delegations

Fri Jul 28 14:12:19 UTC 1995

> 
> > There's a wonderful, much more simple solution... charge for .com addresses
> > on a fee scale which will discourage companies with under $X/yr business
> > from getting straight .com addresses.  As a possible example, $25k/yr for
> > a .com domain name is going to keep most 5-20 person companies out of it
> > (unless they REALLY want it bad) but won't be noticable to most 100 person 
> > companies and Sun and IBM. And $25k/site would fund a lot of NIC activity 8-)
> 
> A charging model for this makes a certain amount of sense, but there are still
> some problems.  First, the IANA is not really empowered to collect fees, and
> the NIC (who is funded to maintain R&E domains, not commercial ones) takes NSF
> money and would therefore be in a difficult position if they charged fees not
> clearly delineated in its contract.
> 
> In other words this is an ISOC/IESG/IAB problem, and a hard one at that.  This
> is the kind of thing that's best done by (dare I say it?) a 501c6 nonprofit
> trade association.  (Ahem.)
> 

I see US centric ideas creaping in again.  .COM is not a US specific problem
and US specific solutions will not fly.  The fiscal argument may involve
a common demomination... say the EUMU.

As to the closing of .COM...  why stop there?  Why not shutdown all
the non geographic aligned domains?  People will just flee to .INT, .ORG
and other locations.  Either that or establish arbitrary rules, along the
lines that were established for .EDU, .MIL, .GOV and all the other 
country TLDs.

I see no reason to close .COM.

--bill