On Tue, 22 Apr 1997, Jordan Mendelson wrote: [once again, for all those people who want to stop reading about iahc, nsi, internic, iana, or anything that deals with alternate registrations, hit 'd' now]
It took THIS long to get InterNIC to where they are today, and now we want to shove in 28 new ones? And each one of these 28 new ones is going to try and add domains to each of the 7 new tlds? We are going to start seeing legal hassles like nothing else. "I sent in my registration for my.firm at 3:32 PST to yyy registrations. Well, I sent mine in at 7:15 EST for it to zzz registrations, but they processed mine first, so I get it".
Personally, I think that the new TLD's are good, though I would personally cut out ones such as .nom because that is just going to cause legal problems about who owns smith.nom, etc, but I don't think new registrars should be added. InterNIC should be it, one company providing this sort of thing is a hell of a lot more powerful than 20 little ones.
The same could be said when AT&T was one company. We are not discussing breaking up NSI but rather adding competition - in the same way MCI and Sprint have added alternatives for people in North America. Yes, all 28 will not survive. But even if 3-4 others do come out and provide users with registration options other than NSI, we will have done our job. I live in a country with a monopoly Telco. If I do not like their service or their options, I have no where to turn. There is no ATM locally and the cost of a T1 line to the USA is $1m/yr. Competition provides alternatives as well as lower costs.
-- Jordan Mendelson : www.wserv.com/~jordy/ Web Services, Inc. : www.wserv.com
Hank Nussbacher IAHC member [the views expressed above belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the other IAHC members]