RE: [wg-c] re: Choosing the intial testbed

["William X. Walsh" <william@userfriendly.com>]

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On 22-Mar-2000 Kendall Dawson wrote:
> My person feeling is that the general public should choose the TLDs/registry
> by a vote. It seems the only democratic way to do this. Rather than telling
> people -- "here are the 10 choices" why not have a Net-wide Web poll
> (sponsored by DNSO) to decide this matter? 

It's nice to toss these great theoretical ideas around, but you must look at
them from a realistic point of view.

How will voters be validated, and how will we prevent voter fraud and multiple
voting by the same people?   If you do it by email address, I can have a
theoretically infinite number of votes, and I can easily write a small program
to automatically vote using each of these infinitely possible email addresses. 
If you do it by IP Address, then all I have to do is use the over 20 (and
growing) number of Free Internet services and login multiple times to each one
(and then to multiple cities, since the voting process is short enough that the
long distance bill for such calls would be short enough to be cost effective).

If you require preregistration, then we have to go through a very lengthly
process that would further delay the introduction of new gTLDs by at least a
year if not 2 or more.   While this may please the Trademark interests, its
unacceptable to the vast majority of the rest of us, and to the internet
community, who have expressed their own desires for new gTLDs at community
sites such as the previously mentioned slashdot.org website.

So when making these proposals, give some thought as to how practical it is to
implement those proposals.

Idealism is nice, but practical reality has to be taken into account.

- --
William X. Walsh <william@userfriendly.com>
http://userfriendly.com/
Fax: 877-860-5412 or +1-559-851-9192
GPG/PGP Key at http://userfriendly.com/wwalsh.gpg
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