Jon Zeef wrote:
Flattening domain name tree by adding more TLDs is the Wrong Thing. It is totally bogus.
How about ceasing .COM allocations altogether? There's .US and .INT.
Which have policies that make them not very usefull for offloading some of .com.
Heh. Are the policies written in stone? Is it gospel or something? Are we supposed to snap to attention as somebody says the magic word "policy"? I'd rather smack those who invent stupid policies on the head so they won't do that again. Can anybody please answer how did it happen that IANA allowed people who cannot come up with sane policies to hijack the country's domain? How did it happen that .US is close to useless?
First you say it's the wrong approach, then you suggest using that basic approach.
Wrong. Did i propose to create new TLDs? Switching from .COM to .US is good because it breaks the dot-envy feeding frenzy. And .US already has a mandatory tree structure in it.
More TLDs is the Right Thing for business reasons and to a small extent, technically.
To a *very* small extent. They're ultimately destructive from the social point of view. How do you propose to prevent the problem which happens in .COM now from repeating at top level? The only thing which kept top level domain from bloating is the strict policy of ISO coutry-codes only. I know several service providers which will start lobbying IANA for new TLDs the very next day it is allowed -- just because they percieve that registries run by competitiors have the ability to harm their business. And you have no way to find out if their claims have any merit. US is lucky to have InterNIC which is *not* in bit transport business. It is not like that in other places. Sorry, new TLDs is worse than non-solution. I've been there with .SU name allocation policies. As long as some guidelines (i.e. only geographical/major metropolitan first-level domains) were maintained everything was fine. They were abandoned for .RU -- and look what a mess it is now. Exactly like .COM. Why the alternative registries won't take subdomains of .US which are not used for states? (Or why not allocate names like <org>.<state><registry#>.US)? *Any* scheme limiting branching of a tree to some reasonable level is better than "new TLD" proposal which does not include any guidelines to that effect. Please do not dump US problems onto outside world. --vadim