[wg-c] Re: Suggestions

[martys@interport.net]

HTA or Joe Baptista posing as HTA wrote:

>I think we have rough consensus (more or less) on 2 items:
>
>- Of the 6-10 new TLDs, at least one must be chartered, to give us experience
>   with how a chartered TLD behaves.
>- Of the 6-10 new TLDs, at least one must be open, to verify the theories of
>   "a new land rush" that a lot of our members hold.


Don't count me as part of that consensus.  The way in which a chartered TLD
would fail is that it won't be very popular.  No big loss (especially if
ICANN waives the fees for the experiment).  The way in which an unchartered
TLD fails is that there is not only a re-run of 1995 style piracy but new
collisions with the dot coms (yahoo.com vs. yahoo.web, etc.).  There would
be irreperable harm. The downside of the unchartered experiment seems to me
to be greater than the downside to the chartered TLD.

p.s. I am using unchartered to mean suffixes which have broad commercial
connotation such as .web, .firm and .biz.  My objection does not pertain to
an open .sky or open .space.


>
>I'd like to draw your attention to a limit type that's not been discussed
>so far, but will be tried in Norway (.no) soon:
>That any attempt to register a domain in a specific TLD has to be sent on
>behalf of an identifiable legal subject (in Norway, a company identified by
>a company ID; other possibilities are credit card numbers or other
>interesting numbers that are relatively easy to come by), and that the
>number of domains available to each identity is limited (in Norway, a limit
>of 15 is suggested).
>
>The purposes behind this is to at least limit the size of the initial
>"rush", and to make large-scale cybersquatting a *little* more difficult.
>
>Just an idea.....
>
>                        Harald
>
>
>--
>Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
>Harald.Alvestrand@edb.maxware.no