RE: [wg-c] Re: IP/TM Concerns & New GTLDs

["Roeland M.J. Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com>]

> Milton Mueller
> Sent: Sunday, August 01, 1999 7:30 PM
>
> Roeland:
> Thanks for the dose of business rationality.
> The issue of how many TLDs the market can sustain is,
> however, different
> from the issue of how many ICANN should be willing to authorize. In
> principle, ICANN should make room in the root for a number of
> names, up to
> the limit where technical instability might be caused. It
> should then let
> the market decide how many of them registries registering
> names under those
> TLDs actually survive.
>
> Based on your business projections, I take it you would agree with the
> proposition that the number of new TLDs should not be fixed,
> but determined
> by the number of registries willing to operate them.

In an indirect manner, I believe that I said exactly that. The point is
that all of the reasons given for restricting gTLDs, at the ICANN level,
are artificial and arbitrary. I have just given a clear and natural
restriction, emplaced by the business environment, which is already
there, no matter what we say or do. Any number less than that will
create a continuance of the current market failure, which is created by
the current restrictions on adding new gTLDs in the root. What I am
advocating here is a market-place restriction vs. a regulatory
restriction. There is no technical barrier to doing so. Kent, not with
standing. Any conceivable technical limits are approached a thousand
orders of magnitude beyond where the marketplace will let it go.

What might be helpful here is to specify a minimum Service Level
Agreement (SLA), such as requireing "whois" service, an automated
"registry", minimum up-times on name servers (99.9% or better), passing
a minimal security audit (cracker proofing), 24x7 NOC, and other minimal
requirements. From the outside, this may not seem like much, but these
are non-trivial requirements and add very much to data center
infrastructure requirements and cost. However, this may also not be
necessary since NSI has already established the minimum SLA, with
rs.internic.net. Any competitor would HAVE to meet those requirements or
not be competitive. Indeed, as many of the current ccTLDs (TO, NU, etc.)
are already finding out.

-----------------------------
Roeland M.J. Meyer
Morgan Hill Software Company, Inc.
http://staff.mhsc.com/~rmeyer
mailto://rmeyer@mhsc.com
-----------------------------