That's odd, we've been assuming only one business model...

[David Collier-Brown <davecb@Canada.Sun.COM>]

Discussion of draft-iahc-stldtech-crispin-00.txt and my previous
chase for bogus assumptions in appreciations triggered a thought...

  We speak of ``a time reflecting the amount of time that has been paid
for'', implicitly assuming that the business model invented by NSI
was the correct one.

  I, too, have assumed in my work on sdmp that we were **renting out 
time in a domain we owned**.
  Yet we have seen at least one message in this group suggesting
that one could also do business on a per-update fee basis. 
``Opening special: $10 for updates to .xyz, this month only!''.

  I'm sure Bob could make a case that the registree/customer is
the owner in every sense of the bottom-level domain and its name, and I
could easily argue that the top-level domains are a public trust, much
like a public road connecting to private physical property.

  If one made such assumptions, the business model would be
very different.  A fee-for-service registry would be immensely
less attractive, because it would not have an income based on the
number of domains, but instead the number of changes in domains,
a much smaller number.
  And I could, would, and do argue that making changes is what the
NSF hired NSI to do...

  Although it would be disappointing to registries who wished
to ``buy'' portions of the namespace, as per draft-postel, it
is far closer to the normal assumptions of the 'net to consider
the namespace a public trust and good. 
  And it is not a terrible thing, just a annoying one: as
various commentators have pointed out, ond does not need to have
invest a lot of money in setting up a registry, so the
reduction in income is not particularly onerous.  And one
doesn't need to do much to one's busines plan or one's software
to switch to serving folks for a fee: after all, most of the
proposed registries are ISPs or are offshoots of ones, all of
whom do business on a similar basis.



  The implications of considering top-level domains a public
trust also include the possibility of regarding (for a particular
definition of leaf) all non-leaf domains part of the public
property of the world.  
  If the definition of leaf is ``belongs to an organization,
business or individual which is not in the business of offering
the namespace for a fee'', then we might have a means of arguing
against domain hoarding, piracy and the like.
  I freely admit that this last speculation is off-topic for this 
group(:-))

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | Always do right. This will gratify some people
185 Ellerslie Ave.,   | astonish the rest.        -- Mark Twain
Willowdale, Ontario   | davecb@hobbes.ss.org, canada.sun.com
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