Re: [wg-c] voting on TLDs

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2000 at 12:08:56AM -0500, Milton Mueller wrote:
[...]
> > 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?

No, it doesn't.  The prior operational risks discussed had the implied
premise that *new registries* (in the sense of technical, physical, and
operational infrastructure) were involved.  Moreover, the current
discussion has to do with whether it is necessary to restrict gTLD
proposals to those who were also proposing new technical, physical, and
operational infrastructure.

> > 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?

Nope.  Excess saliva is interfering with your thinking, I'm afraid.

> > 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?

What's wrong with it is that it involves a root zone with millions of
entries.  It moves the .com problem to the root, and makes it worse. 
*No* company will want to be under any other companies TLD; *all*
companies will want their own TLD.  It won't solve any problems at all. 

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