RE: [wg-c] reposted for Richard S. Campbell

["William X. Walsh" <william@dso.net>]

On 22-Dec-1999 Jonathan Weinberg wrote:
> 
> At part of a study on banking at my agency, I have been looking into the
> idea that a top level domain could be used for specific and well defined
> purposes other than what I usually think of as  a global TLD.  I haven't
> seen any mention of  a managed, or restricted, gTLD.  By this in my instance
> I mean a gTLD that would have a membership based on an assigned and verified
> certification, in my example, that of a bank, where the certification is
> provided by a government regulatory agency. A gTLD of .BNK or .BANK would be
> an indication that the entity was chartered and/or insured by the
> government.  The notion would be to assure the global community that an
> entity was actually a bank, that the site was verifiable and had some
> backing to it. 

Hello Mr. Campbell.  Let me preface my remarks by saying that, overall, I
oppose the unnecessary creation of restricted TLDs, and believe that a high
threshold of need should exist for creating them.  The DNS is not a directory
service, nor is it a certification authority.  Instead it is a naming system of
hosts and networks.  A domain name can be used as "web address," but that is
only one purpose of domain names.

My opposition to the wily nily creation of restricted TLDs stated that
restricted TLDs should only be created where there can be a quantifiable need
establised for a restricted TLD.  I think that .bank could meet that standard,
much along the lines that .edu does.  I would hesitate to place it in the hands
of a governmental regulatory agency, however, because no one govt. should be in
charge of certifying banks from around the world.  If the intent is to create a
place for US Banks, then I would have to say that should be a proposal to the
NTIA for a bank.us domain.

I presume that since the task of managing this domain could be somewhat high,
that the costs would be passed on to the participating banks.

All in all, if the proposal was well written, and didn't try and force a US
Centric policy system on the TLD, I think it would probably find broad support
within the community, and most certainly would be within ICANN's mandate to
provide technical co-ordination.


Best Regards,

--
William X. Walsh <william@dso.net>
DSo Networks  http://dso.net/
Fax: 877-860-5412 or +1-559-851-9192