NAVYJOBS.COM

Jeremy Porter jerry at fc.net
Thu Apr 25 05:36:16 UTC 1996


As much as it pains me to continue this thread, so far no
one has stated or challenged the obvious solution.

>>If I had my way, we would just have country code TLD's and .INT, and
>>.INT would be restricted as it is now do international treaty orgs.
>>However, the market speaks loudly and those of us who do not listen
>>to it will find ourselves sidelined.
>
>The market also "speaks" for address portability and cars which
>make million miles on a gallon.

But the market doesn't speak in these issue, it maybe
whines, but there isn't anyone that has put up the cash on the
table to do either of these, while they are both technically
possible, they are not economically practical.

>I quite agree that we should go with customer demand, but -- as long
>as the road does not go into a nice solid brick wall.
>
>If we won't actively fight dot-envy we're going to get into
>serious name collision problems.  And, no, many many TLDs
>do not change the nature of the problem and just move it
>one level higher.  (Want to bet that as soon as new TLDs will
>be allowed ATT's lawyers would clamour for "ATT" top-level
>domain?)

The question is, is this really a bad thing?  I would
say that it isn't.  


It the IANA, charges $10,000 - $100,000 annually to anyone that
wanted a  TLD, I think we would be fairly well off, at $10,000
a registry would need 200 - 2000 sub domains at $50/year for
it to pay its fees.  

I say that if you charge on the order of $100,000/year,
only people that are commercial registries will be holding
TLDs.
You allow all of the ISO country codes to
continue as is.  Network Solutions can have first bid
on  COM, NET, ORG, EDU, etc., and charge whatever it wants.

These TLD registry fees go to funding root name servers,
BIND, ISC, etc.

>Flattening domain name tree by adding more TLDs is the Wrong Thing.
>It is totally bogus.
>
>>My original proposal was to create enough (tens of thousands) of TLD's such
>>that this sort of small minded protectionist idiocy would be impractical.
>
>It is much better to make dot-envy less sexy by *mandating* minimal
>tree depth under existing domains. Old allocations may be grandfathered,
>and people should be made aware that keeping first-level domain
>names *is* antisocial.

Peer pressure isn't going to cut it, there are more of "them",
than there are of "us".

If someone wants to register in 10,000 TLDs, at $50 each,
let them.  If .COM is a sewer, let it.  People that want
to be registered in a  TLD that doesn't suffer from
excessive name collision, can.

>How about ceasing .COM allocations altogether?  There's .US and .INT.
>
>>The IANA did not see things my way on this point, and so I suspect that the
>>larger companies headed by people with the smaller craniums will all decide
>>to register in every TLD. 
>
>Being antisocial does not mean being stupid.  There's a tangible
>benefit of having names everywhere (in a sense, it is a "replacement"
>for shorter names, as you won't need to remember which TLD was
>used).  Again, this is the case when market forces are directly
>counterproductive.

There should be a tangible cost.

The .COM sewer is a direct result of regulatory distortion.

Useful TLD space, is a finite resource, and everyone hear seems to agree
on that.  We currently have the regulator (IANA), giving a
free monopoly to one organization on "useful" commercial
TLD space.

There are some serious issues with this proposal I will admit,
perhaps the worst is, who decides how registry fees are to allocated,
etc.

Of course I also believe that the Internet could do well with
with modern western "theory" of government, i.e by the people,
of the people, for the people.  But instead of we are
stuck with the relatively harmless IANA dictatorship.

I expect I will get several emails about TLD speculation,
but I PROMISE to ignore them, because they are baseless
speculation founded on lack of understanding of the free
market system.

I would propose a even more radical solution to the
"TLD" problem, but it has some serious implications,
as I have said before there is no technical reason for
the de-facto implementors of name space policy, the root
name servers, to listen to IANA.  But I personally
don't feel up to the challenge of designing a workable
"democratic" governance system for the Internet.  My only
real thought in this, is that the only long term solution
will be some sort of group elected by the population of
the Internet.



-- 
Jeremy Porter, Freeside Communications, Inc.      jerry at fc.net
PO BOX 80315 Austin, Tx 78708  |  1-800-968-8750  |  512-339-6094
http://www.fc.net



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