Re: Johnson, Farber, Maher and Cochetti

[Jeff Williams <jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com>]

Valdis and all,

Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:

> On Thu, 21 May 1998 19:17:23 BST, Jeff Williams said:
> >   Why?  If they are paying for those domains and they represent a spicific
> > stake (Hence the term Stakeholder), they may have a proportionate input
> > to the process.
>
> OK. Assume that there are about 1 million .COM addresses now allocated.
> Assume the $50/year charge in effect.  Thus, for an investment of $51M,
> a corporation fronted by cronies of Bill Gates can buy the internet,
> after registering AAA0.COM, AAA1.COM, and so on up to 9999.COM (assuming
> 26 letters, 10 digits, and the hyphen, 37**4 is 1,874,161, which covers
> the fraction you lose on leading hyphens).

  This is an interesting theory, but has allot of holes in it.  Let me point out
just a few.

1.) Microsoft, which you use as a example, is already under scrutiny, as you
should
     already know.  The antitrust laws in place would certainly not allow for
this
     to happen even if it was another company besides Microsoft, such as AOL.

2.)  There are far to many ISP's and IAP's, large, small and medium in size to
      allow for this to happen.

3.) With .NET still available and not mentioned in you example a huge portion
      of the existing Name Space will remain basically untouched.

4.) The now supposed shortage of IPv4 address space would also cause
     a huge problem to this scenario that you propose to allow for such an
     action to occur.

>
>
> The *REAL* problem is that there's more than one company that would be
> willing to invest $50M to essentially get a stranglehold on the
> Internet.  Compute the impact on the Internet if 5 companies each tried
> to do this.  Consider effects on the .COM registry and the .COM
> nameservers.

  I have, as many if not all of the major players or ISP's and IAP's have
already done.  If you read the four examples i pointed out above you can easily
see the holes it this scenario.  There are of course others.  If you like I will
be
happy to go over those as well.

>
>
> What the Hunt brothers did to the silver market should be a warning lesson.

  It was and is.  They failed!  They lost nearly $1B.

>
>
>                                 Valdis Kletnieks
>                                 Computer Systems Senior Engineer
>                                 Virginia Tech

 regards,

--
Jeffrey A. Williams
DIR. Internet Network Eng/SR. Java/CORBA Development Eng.
Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC.
E-Mail jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com