Here's your chance. You've been complaining about this thread. Hit D now.
There has already been one Sherman Act related lawsuit filed. Collude with others and RICO gets added to the mix.
You must be referring to http://namespace.autono.net/ns./litigation_cont.html. I'm not a judge or jury or even a lawyer, but this suit looks pretty weak to me -- eventually GSA would have to be named as a codefendant and that's not going to work. This too, shall pass.
Giving me money is no guarantee of polite treatment. I do the right thing, money or no money. The funny thing is, people keep giving me money anyway.
A slight correction: You do what *you think* is the right thing.
The difference only matters if you don't trust your own judgement or you accept a higher moral authority than yourself. In the case of DNS I have subjected my moral judgement to the review of people I respect, and have honed it according to the feedback. I'm not aware of a higher authority.
What's necessary is preventing the elimination of free market selection.
And I suppose that we ought to allow the free market to allocate radio frequency spectrum as well. And if you don't like the TV station that is now broadcasting where the CB radios you've been selling also operate, then I guess the market just got less free. And if you don't like the fact that your phone number has been allocated to other people by several local phone companies, then I guess one of those phone companies will achieve some kind of ascendancy and the ones who "mis-"allocated "your" phone numbers will eventually stop doing that or go out of business. In this crowd I'm probably the expert on economic theory, weak though I am on the subject. And a free market requires some basic rules. Unique spectrum allocations backed by the force of law don't constrain the size of the market or its freedom, in fact it is the only way to prevent monopoly forces from squeezing out the little guy. The so-called eDNS allocation scheme is not workable for at least two reasons: someone else will start pDNS and allocate from _their_ version of "." if they think they can "compete"; and, the second level players are not required to cooperate for the greater good of the end users. We have a coherent "." right now, and we're going to continue to have one, and its owners will be subject to the rule of law and to the administration of representatives of the user population. Right now that's IETF/IANA. In the future it will be IAHC/CORE/etc. eDNS does not qualify and is a nonstarter.
Can you point me to a nice summary of the IAHC proposal? And your plan for things if it stalls?
http://www.iahc.org/ has their proposal, as well as background materials like searchable mailing list archives and some historical documents. My plan for things if IAHC stalls is to call folks I know at the various large ISP's and say "if you think ARIN was a good idea, you ain't seen nothin' yet". Ultimately the people who own the gold, make the rules. In civilized countries, everything happens through a government agency who owns the ISO3166 two-letter country code top level domain, and they ignore all of this three- letter silliness. In the US, the government ignores everything we do and we all seem strangely pleased by this, and we hardly use .US at all, preferring to pollute the worldwide name space with our petty desires for short names.