Re: [ga-roots] On why the root is not open

["Milton Mueller" <Mueller@syr.edu>]

Harald:
I would never be so presumptuous as to include you in my "we"
without asking!

By "economic arguments" I meant the following:
it is easy to show that creating only two new
open TLDs exacerbates the cybersquatting problem, whereas creating
500 reduces it. A larger TLD space reduces the value of possessing a 
SLD significantly, and undermines if not destroys the market for
name speculators. 

If there were 500 new TLDs, and no sunrise and other onerous 
regulation of registration, would someone come along and reister
coca-cola.foo? Sure. Some fool would probably try it. Would it matter? 
Depends on what they did with it. If they ran a site that sold
soft drinks and traded on the brand of Coke, they could be and 
would be shut down so fast it wouldn't matter. If they did nothing 
with it, and waiting for Coca Cola to buy it from them, well, in a world
of 500 TLDs I would guess they would wait a long time, because
what value would it have? Domain names would return to being what
they were always supposed to be: semantically meaningful identifiers.

In a 500 TLD world, would cocacola.foo have any more value than

cocacola.syracuse.edu?

www.syracuse.edu/cocacola? 

Both of which are perfectly legal now?

So anyway, by maintaining artificial scarcity, ICANN reinforces the
value of possessing a particular domain name, thereby making
regstration in the new domains more attractive to speculators and
typosquatters, etc, thereby triggering more regulation and dispute
resolution, thereby increasing the costs and administrative overhead
of domainname registration, thereby putting the .BIZ's and .INFOs
at a competitive disadvantage to New.net, or other alternate roots,
thereby making alt roots more attractive. Im sure you can see where
I'm going with this.

>>> Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no> 05/16/01 02:55AM >>>
Be careful about the word "we". It is often hard to know who you are 
referring to.
In this particular case, I don't think you want to include me in your "we", 
since I believe many of the TM lobby's arguments should be classified as 
economic, not political.



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