Re: Monopoly/Ologopoly

[Alan Sullivan <sully@frontiernet.net>]

Kent Crispin wrote:
> 
> Alan Sullivan allegedly said:
> >
> > > Counter, a situation where shared registries are bad!  Vertical markets.
> > > Say a large society (oh, say a professional body, such as... the medical
> > > profession) wanted to register a .MEDICAL domain and restrict it to
> > > registered professionals.  Under this, they may delegate ISO based SLD's
> > > to the associated medical professions governing board.  The rules for
> > > registering in this domain would be quite easy to enforce in this
> > > monopoly situation.  But if the domain _had_ to be shared, there would be
> > > no guarantee of a registrant meeting the criteria (hundreds of registries
> > > all over the world!) thus diluting the benefit of registering in the name
> > > space, both to the detriment of the profession and the general public.
> 
> I don't advocate total sharing of all TLDs among all registrars
> indiscriminately, and I can imagine that circumstances might exist
> where a monopoly TLD would be appropriate.  But this analogy is badly
> flawed.  The single .MEDICAL registrar you postulate is also going to
> have a hard time enforcing the standards world wide -- are the medical
> standards in Bolivia the same as those in China? In fact a shared
> registry would be just as good, if not better, for this particular
> example -- the Chinese registrar for the .MEDICAL domain would be
> familiar with the standards in China, for example.  We could argue
> about who owns what and who controls what, but the cold fact of the
> matter is that the world is really too big and varied for a single
> organization to exercise control from a central point -- control has
> to be dispersed.  Shared registries are one way to do that.
> 
> > > Conclusion:
> > > Whilst shared registries look like they solve a problem, it is not the only
> > > solution to it (if the problem exists at all).  Further, by enforcing the
> > > shared solution, a whole class of registry is prevented from operation.  I
> > > recommend a serious re-evaluation of the concepts of TLDs, in comparison to
> > > a free market where TLD's can be shared/resold/peered/restricted as required
> In a worldwide environment shared registries are the only viable
> solution that allows for the infinite cultural variety the net can
> support.  When I get a domain name I want to deal with someone who
> with the same business practices as me.  It's only fair to extend that
> to other cultures.
> 
> >  Hi,
> > I agree strongly with Stephen, I have noted a number of problems with
> > the shared TLDs and the example of .MEDICAL is another great example of
> > why SHARED REGISTRIES ARE A BAD IDEA! The reason IAHC needs to take up
> > issues of SLDs is because with shared registries NOBODY is responsible
> > for creating policy or enforcing policy with a domain. This requires a
> > generic policy that can never be covered by special case gTLDs such as
> > .medical. Registries exclusive to gTLDs are a GOOD THING. The current
> > monopoly of NSI is BAD.
> > Ask anyone who has had to get a domain in .com - too many horror
> > stories. They HATE the current system. Just put togther a plan that
> > allows registries to compete with NSI. - This leads to another question
> > about the IAHC proposal - what are the 7 new gTLDs? And why 7?
> 
> "I've always been fuzzy about this good-bad thing."  (Ghostbusters)
> 
> --
> Kent Crispin                            "No reason to get excited",
> kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov           the thief he kindly spoke...
> PGP fingerprint:   5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E  87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F
HI Kent,
I can see where you have problems with .medi in the sense that,
indeed each country may have different standards for allowing 
a medical institution, persons, or person to practice medicine.
Obviously the registry which would have exclusive registry usage 
of that domain would decide how to determine who would qualify to have 
a subdomain delegated within the .medi domain, however, your argument
would be more appropriate for arguing that there should .medi subdomains
within the ISO national domains, rather than a good argument for shared 
registries.
Thnaks,
Alan
-- 
Alan Sullivan
President
Top Domain Registry Inc.