Namespace conflicts
Steven M. Bellovin
smb at research.att.com
Fri Mar 9 20:10:51 UTC 2001
In message <20010309143229.C11331 at eiv.com>, Shawn McMahon writes:
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>On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 09:10:09AM -0500, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
>>=20
>> In my area of NJ, virtually every town's "obvious" .com domain names were=
>=20
>> grabbed by one of two competing would-be service providers. They had=20
>> absolutely no town-specific content -- but if the town wanted a Web=20
>> site, they had no choice but to deal with these folks. I have no major=
>=20
>
>Bull. Where is it written that towns MUST have a .com address?
>
>Those towns had .townname.nj.us available to them for FREE.
>
>They chose to use .com, they chose to have the problem. It's about choices.
I chose a bad example, and folks are missing the point. I picked town
names because it was a glaring case that I knew of personally -- but
we've all seen similar behavior in "legitimate" .com space.
But if you want to beat on my original point -- as I and others have
noted, the townname.nj.us domains were also grabbed by speculators. In
other words, that wasn't an option, either. I haven't tracked the
process failure or the policy failure that gave rise to that situation,
but it's very real. I live in Westfield -- try www.westfield.nj.us.
Then try some neighboring towns -- Kenilworth, Cranford, Fanwood,
Summit, and more.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb
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