Paul Vixie wrote:
If I had my way, we would just have country code TLD's and .INT, and .INT would be restricted as it is now do international treaty orgs. However, the market speaks loudly and those of us who do not listen to it will find ourselves sidelined.
The market also "speaks" for address portability and cars which make million miles on a gallon. I quite agree that we should go with customer demand, but -- as long as the road does not go into a nice solid brick wall. If we won't actively fight dot-envy we're going to get into serious name collision problems. And, no, many many TLDs do not change the nature of the problem and just move it one level higher. (Want to bet that as soon as new TLDs will be allowed ATT's lawyers would clamour for "ATT" top-level domain?) Flattening domain name tree by adding more TLDs is the Wrong Thing. It is totally bogus.
My original proposal was to create enough (tens of thousands) of TLD's such that this sort of small minded protectionist idiocy would be impractical.
It is much better to make dot-envy less sexy by *mandating* minimal tree depth under existing domains. Old allocations may be grandfathered, and people should be made aware that keeping first-level domain names *is* antisocial. How about ceasing .COM allocations altogether? There's .US and .INT.
The IANA did not see things my way on this point, and so I suspect that the larger companies headed by people with the smaller craniums will all decide to register in every TLD.
Being antisocial does not mean being stupid. There's a tangible benefit of having names everywhere (in a sense, it is a "replacement" for shorter names, as you won't need to remember which TLD was used). Again, this is the case when market forces are directly counterproductive. --vadim