RE: [wg-c] Eureka?

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

> Behalf Of Kent Crispin
> Sent: Monday, August 09, 1999 9:25 PM
>
> On Sun, Aug 08, 1999 at 09:38:57PM -0400, Milton Mueller wrote:
> >
> >

> > > There are tens of thousands of such companies,
> > > probably hundreds of thousands.
> >
> > Ridiculous. You yourself calculated the meager revenue
> stream that could
> > be expected from registration of domain names in an open
> market. There
> > might at most be a few hundred.
>
> The revenue stream is totally irrelevant.  The advertising value is
> the primary point.  Furthermore, nobody would really want a name in
> .ibm, except IBM.  Therefore, they would have essentially a private
> TLD.
>
> Do you think there might be some demand for private TLDs?  Maybe
> more than a few hundred?

That depends. There is ample business incentive to do so. However, I
estimate that only a percentage of the Fortune 500 would want to. In any
case, they would all be privately chartered TLDs. They would all float a
more generic TLD for general commerce purposes. However, there is a very
low degree of certainty behind that last point.

IBM would certainly do business under .IBM, as would ATT, and HP might
also follow suit. YAHOO might do it, for the panache, as would some of
the other Internet companies. This last point would depend on how long
the fad would last. Branding and marketing a TLD is vastly different
than doing the same for a simple domain name. Of the above, YAHOO makes
the most sense, as a generic TLD. But objective sense isn't as much the
issue as how this would fit into their respective marketing plans. I
guarantee you that only one of us is privy to that sort of data. The
other is committed to an institution.