Thus spake "Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com> > on 12/2/2002 11:13 AM Stephen Sprunk wrote: > > > Okay, so when every foo.com. applies to become a foo., how will you > > control the growth? > > 1/ no trademarks allowed Every combination of characters is trademarked for some purpose in some jurisdiction. If you find some exceptions, I'll find some VC money and take care of that; problem solved. > 2/ competitive rebidding every two years IBM is not going to like potentially losing IBM. every two years to someone with more cash. VeriSign's customers *really* won't like every registration under VERISIGN. going away if VeriSign loses a bid. > 3/ mandatory open downstream registrations (no exclusions) A hierarchy without any kind of classification? That just means everyone will register their under every possible TLD and we'll get a million copies of the same flat namespace. Look at COM. vs NET. today, most SLDs from one exist in the other, and VeriSign even offers a package where they'll register your SLD in every single TLD that exists for one price. > 4/ high entry fees Well, that'll certainly be needed, since the root registrar will need a few hundred DNS servers to handle the volume of new queries in the root now that you've made a flat namespace. > > IMHO, the only solution to this problem is the elimination of gTLDs > > entirely. > > There isn't enough demand to support more than a few dozen popular TLDs. Au contraire. There are several dozens of popular ccTLDs, but only one popular gTLD (out of what, 9 now?). > Generic TLDs are user-driven, with the market deciding which ones they > want to use. Geographic TLDs are completely arbitrary and favor the > functionary instead of the user. That depends on the local functionary. Many ccTLDs are completely free to residents of the respective country. And every one I've worked with has better customer service than the registry for COM. S