apropos of nothing

Sun Jan 16 15:18:22 UTC 2005

Oki all,

I was interested in a policy I came across recently at a cctld registry.

If a domain has no (or few for some value of few) hits over some period
of time post-registration, the registry will recover the string and let
another user acquire it, and presumably actually use it. So if t = 3m,
pokey.cctld could go to four users in the course of a single year, iff
the first three made insufficient use of pokey.cctld during that time.

I'm going to guess that panix.com is different from most of the multi-k
domains that are dropping off the VGRS registry and into today's (well,
yesterday's) drop pool, as measured by use.

I'm going to guess that panix.com is different from most of the multi-k
inter-registrar transfers of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, by the same
use metric.

IMHO, organizing policy around function, actually distinguishing between
panix.com and the overwhelming majority of domain names for which some
change of state at the registry occurs, is a better principle that to
continue to organize policy around trademarks and their buyers and agents,
indifferent to the frequency and distribution of use of a domain name.

At some point, it really _is_ a name-to-addresss map, and not a cognate
for a trademark-to-owner map. It is possible to distinguish risk, and
a policy which chooses not to make distinctions isn't prudent.

In case anyone's missed the obvious, we now have an incoherent dns, and
caching resolver operators have introduced the incoherency, and no one
in the operator community is visibly spitting blood at the intentional
exception to rfc2826. This situation should not continue. Neither should
the "new/hijacked" answers be served.

Eric