Re: [wg-c] voting on TLDs

["Milton Mueller" <mueller@syr.edu>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kent Crispin" <kent@songbird.com>

> Most important, it makes the fatal assumption that the only reason to
> run a TLD registry is to *sell* registrations.  In fact, of course,
> there are a great many different possible reasons to run a TLD registry,
> both commercial and non commercial, that do not involve directly selling
> registrations.

Agreed.

> incremental cost for adding a new gTLD is close to zero.  Any
> technical/business infrastructure that can provide a registry service
> for a single gTLD can provide registry service for a hundred gTLDs.

Agreed again. >chuckle< Kent, have you ever thought about what this fact
does to your and Dave's scare tactics about the "operational risk"
associated with adding TLDs? Kind of blows it out of the water, doesn't it?

> Moreover, the scaling problem caused by adding a new gTLD is
> indistinguishable from the scaling problem of the growth of
> registrations in an already existing gTLD.  (*)

Ditto my comment immediately above. This is just too good. If there are no
costs and no scaling problems associated with adding TLDs, then this debate
is pretty much over, isn't it?

> IBM corp of course has the technical and financial capability to run a
> TLD registry for it's own purposes.  What policy does ICANN adopt that
> prevents this from happening? If, on the other hand, ICANN allows this,
> what is to prevent the hundreds of thousands of other companies that
> already have sufficient resources to run a TLD registry from getting
> their own?

What's wrong with that? That is one of the most clearly beneficial
applications of the expansion of the name space. You profess to be concerned
about "lock-in." What better way to prevent it than to allow companies with
a heavy dependence on the Internet to control their own name space, from the
TLD on down? I look forward to this development and it would have happened
years ago if it weren't for the purely political gridlock associated with
various I* groups' and trademark owners' attempts to seize control of the
root.

--MM