[wg-c] Private TLDs

[Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>]

Kent Crispin wrote:

> Do you think there might be some demand for private TLDs?  Maybe
> more than a few hundred?

The demand for private TLDs is not clear. But it is possible that such
a demand will develop, and that it could pass into the thousands.
I suspect that you will use this in an attempt to scare some of our
more conservative colleagues into rejection of an open, registry-driven
market for TLDs.

In anticipation of that, let me point out that had you told a telephone
company
or its regulator in 1970 that there would be millions of private networks
(LANs and WANs) they would have been equally horrified at the
"inefficiency" and "impossibility" of such a scenario.

The most reasonable way to anticipate the scale of demand for
private TLDs would be to look at the number of large, privately-
managed corporate networks. They run in the low thousands.
Their number is declining with the rise of Internet and VPNs.


--
m i l t o n   m u e l l e r // m u e l l e r @ s y r . e d u
syracuse university          http://istweb.syr.edu/~mueller/