That's sensible engineering practice and in other circumstances I would applaud it. However, we are not in a sensible engineering situation or any other kind of sensible situation -- people, and especially lawyers and marketeers are involved.
Oh lordy, not the lawyers...
[...] We have _got_ to anhililate the value of these names. There is no way on god's green earth that a small company is going to allow themselves to be put way down in a backwater while the more visible namespaces are available to bigger companies. These people will lie on their applications, they will find out what the categorization criteria is and pretend to be something they are not, they will cause the NIC and any other registries to spend a great deal of time trying to verify this information, and ultimately when all is said and done and they don't get what they want, they will _sue_ for restraint of trade.
There's a wonderful, much more simple solution... charge for .com addresses on a fee scale which will discourage companies with under $X/yr business from getting straight .com addresses. As a possible example, $25k/yr for a .com domain name is going to keep most 5-20 person companies out of it (unless they REALLY want it bad) but won't be noticable to most 100 person companies and Sun and IBM. And $25k/site would fund a lot of NIC activity 8-) If you want to be aggressively egalitarian about it, apply it retroactively (which will put my vanity domain out of action, but what the hey). A solution along these lines will let us keep a better engineering-side solution without having the customer or NIC have to jump through hoops to determine validity of applications. I think that rabidly renaming everyone would be overkill. The problem is not (basically) the existing .com, but the future million-plus-businesses case. Establishing a policy now which manages the growth of the .com domain by discouraging its use, but not eliminating it, is a good thing. But we don't have to get all our customers angry at us all at once to do that... we just have to convince most of the new customers that they really don't want a .com address unless they *really* want it... -george george william herbert gherbert@crl.com KD6WUQ Unix / Internet Consultant http://www.crl.com/~gherbert