Now that you and Andrew have pointed it out, and after today's dnsop session, I agree that the trickle of not-DNS domain names is likely only to become larger, and we need a better way to deal with it than a two-month all-IETF debate per name. > why can't we take the Special Names >problem to them, say "look, we understand that these names look >like names in the public DNS root and that confusion that would >have bad effects is a real risk, how about you devise a >procedure for dealing with them that recognizes the importance >of existing deployment and use and considers the low likelihood >that people who are using these names will stop because you tell >them too. Clearly the procedure you use for new gTLD >applications won't work. And, because some of these names won't >wait, if you can't get that procedure together immediately, we'd >be willing to let you delegate things to us on some reasonable >basis until you do." That is an excellent question, and I suppose it couldn't hurt to ask. But I have little confidence that ICANN in anything like its current form, where it is dominated by people who want to collect rent on every imaginable TLD, would come up with an answer any better than let them pay $185K and take their chances. As a second level issue, we might want to consider whether it's worth standardizing DNS escapes which are now typically done by a hacked version of a SOCKS server or DNS resolver. R's, John