Re: "Why expand the number of gtld's at all?"

["andi payn" <payn@null.net>]

Tim Beckham asks, in essence, why we need more gTLDs.

First of all, this question has been answered many times by many people, so
maybe the first thing to do is go digging around the websites for gTLD-MoU,
AlterNIC, and everyone else you can find, plus reading the archives of this
list and the concurrent and preceding lists. But I can try to give you a
brief answer.

There are actually two and a half good reasons to expand the gTLD namespace.

The first is to allow shorter, more mnemonic names. Clearly, extending the
number of domain names won't do much for trademark conflicts (unless you
constrain names to fall within both trademark-category and regional spaces).

However, it will allow for shorter names, and more easily rememberable
names. For example, imagine that I want payn.com for a mail-order sales
company that I run and someone else already has the name for a software
development company. I could use a name like payn-mail-order.com or
paynshop.com or even payn2.com, but payn.shop (or payn.store or whatever) is
clearly simpler, easy to remember, and easy to type. As the namespace
becomes more cluttered, this will become more important. The obvious
disadvantage, of course, is that domain names will not be machine-guessable:
Netscape or MSIE will take much longer to resolve the pseudo-URL "payn" and
will have to pick between "www.payn.com" and www.payn.shop when it does.
However, domain names are already proliferating to the point where they're
becoming unguessable for both humans and software, and there's not much we
can do about that. Hopefully future versions of Netscape and MSIE will
replace the auto-expansion feature with increased support for search and
directory engines.

The second reason is that it may take a bit of a fight to get .com, .net,
and .org out of NSI's hands, and putting additional domain names up will
(hopefully) allow people who don't want to deal with NSI get on the Net
without waiting for the end of that fight.

The "and a half" reason is that these new domain names can be used to
experiment with new ideas. The MoU is intending to experiment with many
changes all at once, with various members of the RSC coalition are intending
to try various different experiments of their own. If some of these turn out
to have unexpectedly bad consequences, the existing gTLDs aren't necessarily
affected.

This, by the way, is possibly the best reason for CORE to get its servers on
line before March 1998, so they can get the "experimental" phase out of the
way as soon as possible and make sure that when NSI's contract expires they
can claim to be a viable alternative.

Furthermore, even if we don't expand the number of gTLDs, there's still the
question of how to manage the existing gTLDs--assuming that control can be
wrested away from NSI. And many of the questions that are arising have more
to do with that issue--management of any kind of valuable resource on the
increasingly-global, increasingly-commercial Internet--than with increasing
the number of gTLDs in itself.

>Few restaurant owners get to put their restaurants on 5th avenue in NYC.
>Few companies get the exact 800 number they want.  Few folks can get their
>last names for vanity license plates.  And we can all get along if just a
>few lucky folks wind up with the choice domain names for their particular
>industry.  That is the way the world works.  Some folks just get there
first.

These are interesting examples that you used, because they're both
ultimately counter-examples to your own idea. Because few companies get the
800 number they want, and because it's harder and harder to get anything
even close to the number they want as the supply of available numbers
dwindled, the system was expanded. There's now an 888 area code with the
same purpose as 800. Furthermore, there are now various special prefixes
being tested in various ways for local or regional toll-free dialing (having
been involved in the early days of 555-xxxx debacle, I can verify that it
was a example of how we shouldn't handle things, by the way).

The restaurant example is even more interesting. When a popular restaurant
row runs out of space for all of the potentially great restaurants that want
to move there, eventually a new restaurant row springs up. In LA, many
stores wanted to be on Melrose, but of course leases kept becoming more and
more expensive. As large chains like the Gap started moving in, this raised
the cost of moving in even more (and, to many stores, lowered the value of
being in that area), and suddenly new areas began springing up. For example,
a number of stores moved to Los Feliz Village on Vermont Ave., where a
number of new nightclubs have also appeared. Many people who wanted to open
a store on Melrose--or expand an existing store--instead opened on Vermont.

In other words, some folks get there first, and eventually a new "there" is
created and a different (but partially overlapping) set of folks get there
first.