Re: Where are we going?

[Aveek Datta <MoNoLiTH+@CMU.EDU>]

Excerpts from mail: 18-Nov-96 Re: Where are we going? by Donald E. E.
3rd@cyberca 
> 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. 

I think that I and some others are jumping the gun here --> some of us have
already assumed that new TLDs will be created and we're just wrangling over
how. A valid point is being made though; why new TLDs? I'm trying to access
the charter on the webpage (very slow...) but I do not know if there is time
to meet the deadline if we first consider whether or not to have new TLDs
and then how to implement them.

Of course rather than creating new TLDs, some short of shared registry
approach could be used. I'm not 100% sure of this, but doesn't AT&T manage
the database that the Internic uses? In any case, there could be a fixed
small fee ($5-$10 per year) for every database entry, and then multiple
registries could provide Internic like services for their own prices. Every
registry would have to use a common form to request an entry. The entity
managing the database (ie AT&T?) would be prohibited from running a
user-level registry itself. 

FYI: The above idea is not something I thought up off but picked up from
reading the newdom mailing lists. It sounds very fair and I'm going to try
to implement it on a smaller scale during winter with several second level
domains.


 Aveek Datta           _ _ _   _                Email: aveek@andrew.cmu.edu
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