[ga] Proposal for Internet Domain Name Olympic Marathon

[Elisabeth Porteneuve <Elisabeth.Porteneuve@cetp.ipsl.fr>]

Collegues,

Whereas I sent the message below to the WG-C list, I feel
that the proposal for Internet Domain Name Olympic Marathon
may be of interest for the entire DNSO. If adopted, we may
have a yearly domain names testbed (similar to the Interop concept
for the IETF), it may bring At-large membership to the ICANN
and the DNSO, and be as well a permanent mean of earning funds for the
DNSO itself. FWIW.

Elisabeth
--

> From porteneu Tue Dec 14 21:33:07 1999
> To: weinberg@mail.msen.com, wg-c@dnso.org
> Subject: Re: [wg-c] IMPORTANT: CONSENSUS CALL
> 
> Dear Collegues,
> 
> My vote is NO.
> 
> I have enormous difficulties to imagine what means
>        *the addition of new global top-level domains should
>        begin with a first round of 6-10 new gTLDs followed
>        by an evaluation period*
> once commercial operations starts.
> 
> In such a situation it would be necessary to define a testbed
> and *mesure* what happens.
> 
> Therefore I submit here a proposal for mesurements and observations
> of one new gTLD, I call it .marathon2000.
> 
> 1. The domain names registered under .marathon2000 will be never used,
>    and the registration will be at no cost to registrants.
> 2. The .marathon2000 will be open for 6 month, with the goal
>    to register as many domain names as possible, more than million
>    would be appreciate.
> 3. To achieve the goal of one million domain names, a worldwide
>    competition should be open, let's call it the First Internet
>    Domain Name Olympic Marathon.
> 4. The .marathon2000 gTLD will be run on shared registrars base
> 5. Few competitions are possible, in registrars and registrants
>    categories. As the purpose is testing, on the one side it is
>    important to reward those who register the biggest number of domain
>    names, on the other it is important to give an opportunity to
>    the Intellectual Property or Non-Commercial or other groups
>    to set up few files with names to be excluded and which exclusion
>    could be tested in the competition (trademark, public institutions,
>    country names, ... anything else the people feel should be excluded;
>    the purpose is not to make any judgement about merits of any list,
>    but request every group to do the work and to put lists of its
>    names together). It is expected that lists of names to be excluded
>    will evolve during competition.
>    As it is a testing field, it is also important to find out as many
>    bugs as possible in a software or a system -- this activity
>    should be encouraged and rewarded too.
>    Eventually montly/weekly statistics and observations should
>    be done, both concerning the number and the nature of registered
>    names and whatever appropriate.
> 6. Probably the most difficult is to find registrants, those willing
>    spend time and working their imagination about names to be registered.
>    Therefore it is necessary to have a big support from the
>    industry of service providers, software providers, microcomputers,
>    telcos, medias and all involved in the Internet to make the 
>    Internet Domain Name Olympic Marathon known worldwide.
> 7. It is expected that the Internet Marathon idea is attractive
>    to all stakeholders, therefore finacing mechanism will somewhat
>    be solved.
> 
> Once the Olympic Marathon ended, all .marathon200 whois database
> will remain in the archives of history as a public ressource.
> The zone files for all domain names will point to the same two
> IP numbers of two NS servers, set up only for this purpose of
> this competition.
> 
> I believe that at the end of such an experiment we may know better,
> every one of us, how a new gTLD may work in today conditions.
> What worries me is that all discussions about new gTLDs reference
> the past -- the beggining of the comercial Internet deployement,
> and it *was* slow in 1993-4 comparing to what we observe today.
> 
> Bottom line - each interested group will be able to mesure the impact
> of such a new gTLD to its interests, and feel safe because this
> prototype will be never used, but will help to understand and
> calibrate the system for the real new gTLDs to come.
> 
> As a side effect of the Internet Marathon we may substantially
> increase the participation in the ICANN/DNSO process, and find
> new At-large members.
> 
> Elisabeth Porteneuve
>