Peter, IMO, a good summary of some of the real issues. Let me add one more piece of the story, which I'm surprised you didn't comment on. Several of us have made, and are making, significant efforts to get directory-like "above DNS" services in place to address the clear user need for more and better naming. Those efforts have gotten good responses from some parts of the community. But, from others, including (apparently) most of the "alternate root", "multiple root", and "superroot", crowds, the response is "more TLDs" or "more root choices, but ICANN is expected to cooperate and accept whatever names we come up with first", or things that are semantically indistinguishable from "the only problem with a single root is that I should be in charge, not ICANN". And that leads some of us to start wondering what species of snake is being used to produce all of that fragrant, multipurpose, oil. regards, john --On Monday, 29 July, 2002 19:15 -0700 Peter Deutsch <pdeutsch@earthlink.net> wrote: > g'day, > > Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: >> >> On Mon, 29 Jul 2002 02:11:57 PDT, Einar Stefferud >> <Stef@thor.nma.com> said: >> >> > ORSC was highly successful in this effort, until ICANN >> > chose to collide with one of our ORSC pre-existing TLDs, >> > and the refusal of ICANN (and others such as IETF, IAB and >> > ISOC) to recognize this >> >> So what you're saying is that if there's no coordination, >> there's a problem. >>... > Works? Yeah, maybe for some definition of "works", in that > people can give money to more than one entity to get a > string into .COM, but is that really solving the problem > ordinary users actually want solved? Last time I went to get > a new domain name, I was down to either choosing words from > an Old English dictionary (I went with "gydig", which means > I think I'm either "insane, or touched by the Gods" :-) or > explaining to folks "No, that really is a domain name, even > if it doesn't end in .COM". When I read "works" it sort of > reminds me of that old saw about "the operation was a > success, but the patient died". >... > Maybe there really *are* two different debates here. We seem > to be guilty of simultaneously complaining about the threat > inherent in attempts at building multiple roots, while > telling folks to keep their mits off the current root. Now, > this position makes sense only if there's really a single > possible outcome here (keep the current DNS name resolution > functionality with no extensions), but what if what those > other folks are doing really doesn't belong in the current > DNS tree anyways, but is useful to some folks? Shouldn't we > be *encouraging* them to take their work off out of the DNS > tree? > > If we agree that the DNS works eminently fine for its > intended purpose, but would be threatened by instability if > we were to allow the sort of > innovation/experimentation/fooling around that some folks > would like to see, then let's pack 'em off to "directory > service land", where people operate additional services to > serve communities of size n, for n less than the whole > Internet. Now, if they did that couldn't we even let them > talk about what hooks might be useful to allow communication > from such services back on planet Internet? This would seem > to bring this debate back to something like "how do we tie > together multiple, sometimes disparate services using a > single communications system"? Hopefully, we can agree that > such a question is in scope for this community, whereas > "when do we get more TLDs" is clearly so far out that it > just makes us tired yelling about it....