Re: [wg-c] Choosing the intial testbed

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

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Charles Broomfield"

> I'm sure that ".ibm", ".adidas", ".linux", ".toyota", ".pepsi" etc would
be
> great TLDs from the point of view of their respective owners, but I can't
> quite see the usefulness to the rest of the 'net for them.

Uhhh...do you see the usefulness of linux.com, ibm.com, toyota.com, and
pepsi.com?
It is of tremendous value for a company or a group to be able to manage its
own name space, from top to bottom. It would solve a lot of the trademark
problems, for one.
At any rate, If the rest of the net doesn't think those TLDs are useful they
won't go there. It won't cost us anything to create them (I'm just quoting
Kent here, you seem to agree with him a lot). I don't think .cc and about
100 other ccTLDs are very useful, but they are there, and it doesn't bother
me a bit.

I strongly protest the rhetorical tactic of attempting to establish
"usefulness to the entire Internet community" as the baseline standard for
setting policy. That is nothing but an arbitrary straitjacket, an impossible
standard for any proposal to meet, and only leads to ridiculous debates
about which pipsqueak on this absurd list speaks for the entire world.

The Internet is a way for millions of privately owned computers and
thousands of private and public networks to connect with each other. To the
global set of computer users as a whole, almost any ONE of the sites is of
little significance. But the Internet acquired its value as a system
precisely because it didn't have a bunch of bureaucrats sitting around
deciding for the rest of the world whether "bla-bla.com" was of sufficient
merit to be granted the immense privilege of a domain name, or whether the
content on "bourgeois.com" was "useful" to some imagined collectivity. It
just connected everybody. And in case you hadn't noticed, connecting
everyone and coordinating resources is supposed to be ICANN's job. So let's
get down to it.