[wg-c] A different perspective

["Mark C. Langston" <skritch@home.com>]

Ok, we've all been chewing on the TM aspect of SLDs for a while now.
However, something came up in conversation today that I think might have
bearing on this...the coming networking of every aspect of your life.

Right now, like it or not, people are working as hard as possible to
make things like cell phones, televisions, toasters, houses, etc. 
addressible via the Internet.  Now, instead of there being the select
few individuals who want or need to hold a SLD, there will be hordes
of people, all of whom will want to purchase and hold SLDs and 3LDs
for their new networked gadgets.  There won't be the occasional house or
two with more than one networked computer...suddenly many, many homes
will have to become mini-ISPs, providing DNS and mail hosting services
for the various networked appliances of their owners.

Aside from the fact that this sounds like a lucrative market to get
started in :), there's the simple fact that we're out of domain names
NOW.  What happens in 5 years, as these products become part of
everyday life?

The scarcity of domain names is due to two major factors:

1)  The psychological fixation on ".com" as the only real TLD, and
2)  The very real resistance against adding a significant number of
    new TLDs to the root.

This scarcity isn't a natural scarcity.  We can have as many TLDs, and
as many SLDs, as we could every possibly hope to have.  IPv6 has the
potential to allow every man, woman, and child on this planet to have
enough IPs to individually address every atom in the universe.  To 
believe that the status quo demand for SLDs will remain constant in
the near future is folly.  If there's such a concern over policing
namespace now, then the TM interests should be apopleptic over the
introduction of IPv6, because every one of those IPs could potentially
be assigned a domain name.

The question is, will we be foresighted enough to deal with this issue
now, in the absence of overwhelming pressure to add new TLDs, or will
we wait?

I think it makes more sense to deal with this now, while the situation
is calmer than it stands to be in the near future.

-- 
Mark C. Langston	     			Let your voice be heard:
mark@bitshift.org				     http://www.idno.org
Systems Admin					    http://www.icann.org
San Jose, CA					     http://www.dnso.org