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Re: [wg-c] Eureka?



At 03:08 AM 8/9/99 , Javier SOLA wrote:
The point is about scarce resources, not about companies that operate in an
unlimited market. You can compete as a portal or a bookstore in the
Internet. There might be as many of these as they wish to be, but only one
registry can be ".info". It is a natural monopoly, and it is not a good

Words are not natural monopolies, and in the U.S. there is
zero chance of their ever being treated as such for Internet
related tags.  Indeed, the notion of a natural monopoly even
in regulated industries has pretty much disappeared.


idea to give it to somebody to explote it. One was given temporarily to
NSI, and look what happened... or data, handed to a US Government
contractor for handling the registry is considered by them now as their
private property, and they have discontinued data services, a a proper

Check out the NIS solicitation.  It was one of several thousand
research projects to companies and institutions, and the
intellectual property goes to the awardee.  You may not like it,
but that's the way it works.  It was also AT&T under that agreement
that got the "data services" contract, not NSI.

The underlying purpose of the solicitation was to come up with
innovative approaches to scaling up use of the identifiers.
The project was highly successful.  In 1992, COM, ORG, and
NET were flat and everyone thought the commercial growth would
occur in the US domain.    However, the uniquely low barriers
and commercial promotion of COM, ORG, and NET helped scaled a market
and the Internet.  Had a commercial company driven use of the US
domain instead of a non-profit, all the weeping and gnashing of
teeth would be about the US domain.

whois...  Is that a free market?  If it was a bookstore, I would move to
another one, I cannot do that here.

You already have - looks like you're using aui.es


--tony