new.net: yet another dns namespace overlay play

Thu Mar 8 05:44:56 UTC 2001

On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 02:51:31PM -0800, Mike Batchelor wrote:
> 
> > I'm pretty sure that I didn't want it to come to this, and I'm
> > not entirely
> > convinced that anyone should be doing it.  But personal
> > reservations aside,
> > its happening.  And I intend to see that its done as well as possible.
> 
> Then why did you and David ignore my plea to cooperate with the extant TLD
> managers, with whom the new.net TLDs now collide?  You could have launched
> the new.net TLDs with a bunch of in-place registrants already hosting sites
> under the TLDs you have collided with.  You could have built a shared
> registration system that could have encompassed all the non-ICANN TLDs, and
> helped create something that would have really given serious challenge to
> ICANN.  But instead, you chose to ignore me, and the others.  Now we have a
> mess on our hands, for example, who is really the registrant of
> warren.family, the one who has held the Pacificroot warren.family for 4
> years, or the one who just got warren.family from new.net on Monday?

But if they had done the net-friendly thing (created a
partnership/coalition/whatever with existing alternate roots), that
would have.. been the net-friendly thing.

Sure they could have done this, instantly strengthened their
position, and maybe created a serious enough force that ICANN may
have felt it and reacted intelligently. As it is they're just
another alternative root, albeit with more $$ than most.

Will they survive? maybe. Given the fate of similar idealab!
creations it's certainly not a statistical probability.

...

Of course, who are we to challenge new.net, with their
patent-pending technology for appending ".new.net." to hostnames,
leading partnerships with exciting companies like earthlink!
and they exist to a whopping 16 million users, are easily accessed
by everyone else willing to fiddle with their resolver (well, not
mail, sorry we need to invent a sendmail plugin for that one).

Besides, nothing that ever came out of palo alto and was spun
up by a "think tank" with an exclamation mark appended to their name
ever went wrong, right?

Last I checked guesstimates of internet users globally was something
like 400 million people, ~30% were in north america,
~25% in europe, ~20% in asia/oceania, ~10% in south america.
Maybe these figures seem high, but remember that only a considerable
subset will be regular [ab]users.

16 million, probably an aggressive figure to start with, any way you
look at it, nothing but a drop in the bucket.

aaron: when you guys end up on fuckedcompany, can I get a deal on
some of that nice hardware you [probably] have over there? Maybe a 
terabyte disk farm, or a highend server (I'll pay shipping).

cheers,
 - wolfie.

-- 
Brian Russo      <brusso at phys.hawaii.edu>
Debian/GNU Linux <wolfie at debian.org> http://www.debian.org
LPSG "member"    <wolfie at lpsg.org>   http://www.lpsg.org
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