In message <20010309064952.B10940@eiv.com>, Shawn McMahon writes:
On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 05:27:20PM -0800, Tony Hain wrote:
More precisely, the courts started getting involved as soon as first-come-first-serve stopped working fine.
No, someone involved the courts when they were second, and the courts didn't understand so they didn't smack it back at the lawyers "dismissed with prejudice".
DNS didn't make the mess, the courts did.
In my area of NJ, virtually every town's "obvious" .com domain names were grabbed by one of two competing would-be service providers. They had absolutely no town-specific content -- but if the town wanted a Web site, they had no choice but to deal with these folks. I have no major problem with first-come, first-served *productive* use of a domain name, but frankly, that's not where the problem has been. The problem has been speculators and cybersquatters. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb