Re: "Claiming" a TLD

[John Charles Broomfield <jbroom@manta.outremer.com>]

> > > How does one "claim" a TLD?
> > [Palmer, John]
> >
> > gTLD's can be service marks. .EARTH, .USA and .Z are examples.
> >They cannot be used by anyone else
> > but their owner unless given permission by that owner.
> >
> So, do you mean to say I just have to register, say, ".dog" as a service
> mark and  just hold on long enough, and then one day the dog-loving world
> will beat a path to my door? Hmmm.

Well, that's what people like John Palmer, Chris Ambler, Karl Denninger,
Eugene Kashpureff (currently in jail I think) and others would want you to
believe.
To be honest, they're not that far off from the truth. Set up a set of
nameservers that can handle your ".dog", give it enough publicity, have the
internet population think you're doing a good job and that you're
trustworthy and worthwhile (ie, build up consensus), and suddenly you'll
find that the people in charge of nameservers will start pointing them at
you.
On the other hand, should your "service" not really be that flashy,
interesting, worthwhile, stable or whatever, and you'll find that only a
laughable proportion of the worlds servers will "look" at you.
For now, in general terms, the worlds servers point at the set of servers
authored by IANA (probably because they don't like the alternatives, or
don't trust them, though others may argue that it's because of apathy).
IANA doesn't seem to like the idea of "giving" generic TLDs to individual
companies, which is why the gTLD-MoU thing has come to exist.
Don't be mistaken though, the gTLD-MoU is only proposing how to do things in
some TLDs that IANA will be entering into its servers, not at all forcing
anyone to look at those servers (it happens that most of the world DOES look
at those servers, but it's voluntary).
Those "claimants" of TLDs like alternic, eDNS, IODesign, whatever... now
seem to argue that they should be allowed to force themselves into the IANA
servers. Initially they set up shop under the pretense that "we can do
better than IANA, and we'll prove it". Unfortunately for them, most of the
internet considers them to be irrelevant, so you can't today resolve (in
99.5% of the nets servers) things like .earth, .web, .nic, .whatever. As
people didn't care about them (and didn't point at them), now they want to
force their way into the IANA servers...
Make up your own mind.
The world is free, and no one will stop you from configuring your name
server any way you want. Getting the rest of the world to go along with you
is, however, a whole new ball game.

Yours, John Broomfield.