Re: Thread 3: selection of registrars

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

On Tue, 24 Dec 1996, Christopher Ambler wrote:

> Why
> can't they keep going as they're going? They certainly don't need
> the money from the NSF, and that 30% increase in revenue generated by
> their halting of the "Internet Fund" contributions will cover the
> loss of NSF funds nicely.
> 
> I cannot believe that the IAHC hasn't asked themselves these questions.
> I cannot believe that the IAHC doesn't have some of these answers. Care
> to share them with the rest of us?

I hope that the IAHC doesn't waste too much time wondering what a US
government agency (NSF) is going to do regarding their contract with
a US corporation (NSI). As a Canadian resident I don't particularly care
what they do and am satisfied to to let Americans work this out by
themselves through lobbying their government or through their court
system.

IAHC's most important job is to come up with a reasonable international
plan for the next step in growth for the Internet's domain name system. 
It won't be the last step either, but if they keep their focus on the
international part of the program they cannot go far wrong.

The only concern I have with NSI is that the IAHC not put any levers of
power into NSI's hands such as the possibility that NSI could affect the
plan negatively by offering to share the .COM, .ORG, and .NET gTLD's as of
March 1997. I'm not convinced that there is neccesarily a negative effect
but aside from this I don't see that NSI's actions are of significant
importance.

Why is NSI largely irrelevant? Because the Internet is *THE* global public
internetwork and today is is merely a shadow of what it will become. Some
two-bit American company like NSI is far less relevant than the vast
majority of international organizations and companies who are involved in
building this network. There is not a chance that these companies would
agree to have a critical part of the infrastructure under the control of
one company.

Remember that today's Internet is at least 3 orders of magnitude smaller
than the Internet of 2006, i.e. the Internet of 2006 will have roughly
1,000 times as many hosts and users as the Internet of today. And at least
1,000 times as many domain names too. It will eventually settle down when
every person has an average of four domain names.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael@memra.com