Re: [wg-c] Re: A question about .INT (Fwd for Mike StJohns)

[Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>]

Brunner wrote:

> The author of this oddly pronouned prose appears to think that .INT was conceived in
> joy and welcomed without reserve -- not quite the way you recounted in Minneapolis.

As usual, Brunner's comments are just an irrelevant hook upon which to hang personal
insults. Nothing in my comments said anything about whether INT was "welcomed" or not,
and besides that has nothing to do with the issue that was raised.

My point, in case it still isn't clear, was this: there are no serious operational,
economic, or policy issues raised when you create TLDs narrowly scoped for specific types
of registrants. We could introduce 100 of them tomorrow and no one would notice -- the
only issue would be the administrative one of deciding who got to run them.

As Rutkowski showed, .INT has less than 80 registrations in it. It's less than a drop in
the ocean. What would we "learn," therefore, from a "testbed" that created one or two
.INT-like tlds? My answer was that we would learn nothing of value. We've been there,
we've done that.

Less explicitly, I was suggesting that those who believe in confining the initial round
of TLD introductions to .INT-like registries are just trying to maintain the status quo
of artificial scarcity while appearing to support name space expansion. I'm not fooled.

A new "museum" tld that might attract 100-200 registrations? Get serious. I am not saying
that such a tld shouldn't be created -- I am, after all, the guy who believes that
thousands of them could be and should be created. I am saying that such a move is not a
"test" of anything important and does not address the basic resource allocation and
assignment conflicts that ICANN was created to resolve.