Re: [wg-c] straw vote -- question one results & call for votes on

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Sat, Aug 21, 1999 at 10:47:59PM -0700, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:

> There may be a
> demand, but once a service is provided, the demanders need to be told
> about the service that will satisfy their demand. No one has yet
> perfected telepathy. The demand just means that they won't need much
> convincing. You still have to find them and tell them the story.

I can think of at least two obvious answers to this point.  First,
registrars provide marketing at that level.  And second, and more
important, it is simply not true that it always takes a marketing
effort to sell something -- until just the last year or so, NSI never
marketed .com.  In fact, the cynics among us would claim that NSI's
current loopy marketing efforts are simply an effort to build their
case that they own rights to .com.  The growth in .com registrations
has *not* been driven by any marketing plan. 

But there is a more fundamental point to be derived from this talk of
marketing.  The marketing you are talking about is of the *TLD* in
question -- it is the *TLD* that you are describing as being
marketed, not the physical registry. 

This is an important distinction...

A physical registry markets itself on the quality of its network
connections, the reliability of its servers, the security of its
facilities, and so on.  It competes on the basis of the quality of
the service it provides, not on the basis of its control of a piece 
of intellectualy property. 

But there is no necessary connection between the physical registry
and any particular TLD.  A physical registry could make a healthy,
*profitable*, living running several small TLDs, just as well as
running one big TLD.  Whether or not a TLD is marketed is completely
independent of the success of such a physical registry -- it makes
its living by providing a good service, and because it specializes in
providing that good service, it wins rebids year after year, without
spending a dime on "marketing" TLDs. 

This implies, for example, that if one "owns" a TLD one doesn't need
to run a physical registry at all -- you simply subcontract that to
some company who will run it for you.  To be concrete, if Jay Fenello
"owns" .per as a TLD, he doesn't have to run a physical registry --
he could contract with MHSC to run the registry for him -- or IBM or 
D&B, or AboveNet, or any of a thousand other companies that could do 
the job.  

The real critical item is "ownership" of 1) the right to specify the
IP addresses of name servers associated with a particular TLD in the
Root zone; and secondarily 2) the database of entities who have paid
to put a particular subdomain in that TLD. 

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Do good, and you'll be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain