Re: Where are we going?

["Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <dee@cybercash.com>]

I didn't see anyone say there would be technical difficulties or techncial
confusion.  It was human confusion that was the potential problem.

There are a lot of national TLDs.  If the problem were purely more TLDs, some
of those nations (a few of which already provides flags of convenient for
ships, etc.) would be out there selling domain registration services making
their national TLD into a de facto international TLD.  But both people with
names to register and people with names to look up act as if they wanted only
a few iTLDs and perhaps only one default iTLD. 

As far as I can see, the only major current problem in the NSI monopoly
leading to unilateral policy changes and similar sorts of fallout typical of
a monopoly.  But it's not clear to me that creating just .biz or creating a
100 or even 10000 TLDs is actually going to solve this problem if most people
just continue to use .com.  And it ceratinly will create a lot of confusion
in people's minds.  If creating officially blessed new iTLDs will solve the
NSI monopoly problem, then most of the benefit will come from the first few
additional iTLDs.  After a dozen or so new competing iTLD services, each
additional one is likely to add little marginal benefit. 

And exactly why is it that all these new services have to be top level
domains instead of under .alt (or .x if you want it shorter) or (except for
the NSI problem) under .alt.com? 

On Mon, 18 Nov 1996, Bob Allisat wrote:

> Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 13:32:59 -0500
> From: Bob Allisat <tor@wtv.net>
> To: john.harvey@dir.org, hank@ibm.net.il
> Cc: iahc-discuss@iahc.org
> Subject: Re: Where are we going?
> 
> John Harvey wrote:
> >I agree, more iTLDs could mean more confusion.  If I am not mistaken the
> >need for some form of directory was the consensus of opinion on the IETF
> >list.  Now the IAHC has been charged with increasing iTLDs and
> >competition without fragmenting interoperability, are directories to be
> >discussed here?
> 
>  The technical issues have been
>  hashed out months ago. The consesus
>  is that up to 10,000 new TLD's could
>  be easily and readily accomodated
>  without any difficulty. Too bad few
>  of these IAHC people have had any
>  exposure to past discussions.

I believe you are wrong and most of them have.

>                              Bob Allisat
> 
>    PO Box 191 Station E Toronto Canada M6H 4E2      (416) 588-0670

Donald
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