Re: [ga] Critics say "there's no shortage of dotcoms"

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 07:49:28PM +1000, Patrick Corliss wrote:

[...]

> (1) I said "dotcoms" because the general thrust of some people's
> argument is that there is a shortage in that gTLD.  Certainly there is
> no shortage of domain names at the second level. 
>
> (2) You say that "people disagree with me".  People who understand the
> subject don't.  From memory 67 characters are allowed including the .com
> which is four characters.  That means you can have 63 alphanumerics
> before the dot. 
>
> Since there are 26 alphabetics, ten numerics and a hyphen, that's a
> BIG number. 

Irrelevant.  When people say "shortage" they mean "shortage of *good*
names", and currently, that means "short, meaningful, clever names",
not "long meaningless random strings".  Indeed, there is an abundant
supply of names that people don't want, but that doesn't in any way 
negate the fact that there is a "shortage".

The "shortage", in short, is a (fascinating) sociological phenomenon,
not a technical one, and a good argument could be made that the shortage
is a PERMANENT PHENOMENON, a function of the psychology of group 
preferences.  If so, then conventional supply/demand economic analysis 
is largely worthless.

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain
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