I've just tried new.net's plugin. Don't.

Sat Mar 17 04:23:54 UTC 2001

At 10:03 AM 3/16/01 -0500, Charles Scott wrote:

>Frankly, that kind of approach sets me
>off pretty quick and my natural reaction is to get in their face and
>become a roadblock. Still, if I was one of the few selected ones
>benifitting from this rollout, I'd be working to see it succeed
>also. Could that be why we see what appears to be competing opinions on
>this topic?

I'm going to answer that as I'm probably one of those competing opinions. 
Einar Stefferud (ORSC Chairman) and myself (I have no personal stake in 
either Verisign or New.net) had a good long conversation with New.net 
today. New.net have a business plan and are just doing what all the other 
.COMs are doing - trying to make a living as fast and quickly as the next. 
They are an incubator company within IdeaLab. They don't even have their 
own dedicated office space yet, they pool resources (conference 
rooms/copiers) with the other IdeaLab companies. They do know how register 
domain names and how to contact the media and government. They are not so 
good at juggling breakable objects.

The Internet works on the principles of cooperation and this is the driving 
force behind ORSC. The basic premise of ORSC is an idea - of how trust and 
cooperation functions on the Internet regardless of any financial 
consideration or marketing budget. It helps to have money, but ORSC has 
existed without it since 1997. The ORSC root contains women-owned small 
businesses and giant multi-nationals side-by-side. As a result, it's an 
idea that can't be killed just by pulling the plug on the funding. New.net, 
on the other hand, will last as long as there is money in the bank.

As far as the ORSC goes, there is no financial incentive or kickback to 
ORSC. It is possible that TLD managers recognized by the ORSC root may 
enter into relationships with New.net, just like they do with Verisign or 
Tucows or their local pizza delivery service or upstream provider (let's 
not go there!). I'm not aware of any such relationships but wouldn't be 
surprised if they happened as a result of ironing out the New.net TLD 
collisions.

Unfortunately, the most interesting remark I found was one describing Bill 
Gross, the founder of IdeaLab. Somebody mentioned about him "having an idea 
and funding it without thought for the real world consequences". So yes, 
what New.net have done was not thought through as carefully as it might 
have been. Chalk it up to experience. Y'all can now say "we told you so".

If New.net carry on without thought for the consequences, I'm sure they 
will become as popular as the other defunct IdeaLab ventures. If they 
choose to cooperate with the rest of the community, avoid the TLD naming 
conflicts somehow (we're trying to find some common ground to make this a 
reality), and stop making big waves into your routers and help desks then 
there has been some positive progress.

Best Regards,

Simon Higgs

--
It's a feature not a bug...