Re: [wg-review] Clarifications requested from BoD, Staff, NC, TC, Chair prior to co-Chair elections

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2001 at 12:53:49PM +0100, Robin Miller wrote:
> Kent Crispin wrote:
> > The question is, of course, who are the customers? The primary customers
> > of the domain name system are in fact *businesses*, not individual
> > netizens -- a very large majority of domain-names in use are used for
> > commercial purposes. 
[...]

> please provide the statistics that support your obviously fallacious
> opinion... 

???

I haven't looked recently -- about a year ago there was a news article 
quoted on the various lists, where NSI was quoted as saying that 
approximately 80% of domain names were commercial; that the rest were 
individuals and organizations.  They did note at that time the 
percentage of individual users was growing, but it was still small.  I 
will try to find that article for you.

In the meantime, in fact what I say is quite obviously true, and you 
can verify it yourself -- go to your favorite search engine (I use 
google these days), and put in a common word like "dog".  This will get 
you thousands of hits.  The URLs returned will contain a sample of 
domain names that you can look at.  Then go down through the list of 
URLs, and look at the main site for each domain name you see, and 
classify the domain name as commercial or not.  Note that if you see 
something like "http://members.geocities.net/...", that clearly counts 
as a commercial domain name.

If you do this exercise you will quickly discover that the overwhelming 
majority of domain names (not urls) are commercial.

> Its my experience that if any business has any majority on the net at
> all, its the small businesses owned by individuals.

Nothing surprising here -- small businesses vastly outnumber large 
businesses. 

> Some of those small
> businesses that were birthed by individuals became larger businesses
> like Amazon and Yahoo.  I am also a small business owner and an
> individual at the same time - and my business is totally dependent on
> the Internet

Precisely.  Songbird is a small business.  But it *is* a business.

> - the opportunities for me were birthed out of the amazing
> technologies of the Internet - which were also invented primarily by
>INDIVIDUALS.

So what?  Ultimately *everything* is done by individuals.  The issue is 
whether they are running a business.
 
> The big corps were late-comers to the Internet game, all of us that
> have been on the Net for a while KNOW this... Even Esther Dyson herself
> has noted the majority of us are individuals and small business owners -
> most being one and the same thing. 

Sorry, you are mixing things up.  There were many large businesses on
the net quite early on.  ED's quote simply reflects the obvious fact
that the number of small businesses vastly outnumbers the number of 
large businesses.

> And so, now the owners of small business want their individual and business
> interests represented. Those interests have NOT been represented. 

Oh yes they most certainly have.  The Internation Chambers of Commerce,
for example, represents literally MILLIONS of SMALL businesses, and the 
International Chambers of Commerce is a member of the business 
constituency. 

> Big business interests are NOT the Net majority that registers a
> domain name,they do NOT represent the Internet consumers,

But internet consumers don't have domain names, and are for the most 
part totally indifferent to the issues surrounding domain names.

> they do NOT
> represent the huge diversity of business on the Internet, and they are
> the business interests that have been EXCLUSIVELY catered to in that
> so-called 'consensus' that resulted in the current structure. 

Sorry, that is simply incorrect.  The Business Constituency is organized
to include *organizations representing businesses*, and collectively
they represent a huge number of businesses, of all sizes. 


-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain
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