new.net: yet another dns namespace overlay play

Wed Mar 7 00:45:03 UTC 2001

Joe Provo wrote:
> 
> Interesting how this will play into Earthlink's "provider of the real
> internet" advertizing... is providing an inclusively inconsistant view 
> of the namespace more real than doing so by exclusion? :-)  Is an
> inconsistant namespace "worse" than transparent caching, or other "not
> real Internet" practices?  Either way, it becomes a matter of end-user 
> confusion. Personally, I think this will be the significant 'secession' 
> from the current collective DNS tree that other attempts have not been.

Speaking as someone who used to work there... the best explanation we could
ever come up with was that Earthlink really did want to be Pepsi to AOL's
Coke (which works, seeing where they're based after the Mindspring merger).
It can be summed up by the phrase "The biggest, and second-best". If you
look at the amount of private, users-only (or "must do extra stuff to get
it if you're not a user") services AOL has... is it any suprise that the
second-biggest dialup ISP is completely willing to do the same sort of
thing to get their users "access to more of the internet"?

No, the Web isn't the Internet - but it's the cash cow that gives most of
the folks on this list their jobs, if often indirectly. Who wants to take
bets that the most-looked-up of their "new TLDs" is .xxx? Anyone? I could
use the spare cash...
-- 
***************************************************************************
Joel Baker                           System Administrator - lightbearer.com
lucifer at lightbearer.com              http://www.lightbearer.com/~lucifer