Namespace conflicts

Fri Mar 9 14:10:09 UTC 2001

In message <20010309064952.B10940 at eiv.com>, Shawn McMahon writes:
>

>On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 05:27:20PM -0800, Tony Hain wrote:
>> More precisely, the courts started getting involved as soon as
>> first-come-first-serve stopped working fine.
>
>No, someone involved the courts when they were second, and the courts
>didn't understand so they didn't smack it back at the lawyers "dismissed
>with prejudice".
>
>DNS didn't make the mess, the courts did.

In my area of NJ, virtually every town's "obvious" .com domain names were 
grabbed by one of two competing would-be service providers.  They had 
absolutely no town-specific content -- but if the town wanted a Web 
site, they had no choice but to deal with these folks.  I have no major 
problem with first-come, first-served *productive* use of a domain name,
but frankly, that's not where the problem has been.  The problem has 
been speculators and cybersquatters.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb