On Fri, 28 Jul 1995, Nicolas Williams wrote:
Think about it: if IBM wants IBM.COM, rather than IBM.COM.NY.US, then let them buy the right to register a name in the .COM hierarchy, but they should pay more for that than for a name in the COM.NY.US. Seriously, in the long run, many services will be tradeable as comodities in futures markets;
In Canad we have an agricultural commodity known as "quota" which is sold on the open market. There are provincial marketing boards, like the Ontario Milk Marketing Board, which have set a quota on the number of litres of raw milk that may be produced by farmers in the province. This annual quota is divided up and allocated to farmers. Originally it was a cheap thing to get, but you could only get so much quota. If your herd produced 400 gallons a day and the board would only issue you with 300 gallons of quota, you could dump the milk, sell the cows, feed the milk to pigs, but you could not sell that milk, period. So some farmers figured out that it was worth a considerable sum to buy quota from other farmers and that they could make money by increasing their dairy herds to the carrying capacity of their farms. Nowadays it is not unusual for quota to be sold for the value of 2 years production which means the farmer doesn't start to make money on the quota for two years. Nobody intended for this to happen, but it did happen. If the INternic does not loosen up the bonds on top level domains it will happen in this industry too. I think top level domains should be issued like the FCC issues frequencies. Some should be free like .COM, .NET, .ORG and some should be auctioned off like .PSI, .MCS, .NETCOM, .UUNET etc. Hold an auction for three top level domains to the highest bidder. Winners get to choose their name greater than 2 characters (ISO 3166) and less than 8 characters. Next year auction off another three. At each auction, issue a few free toplevels as well. How many companies would pay to have yourname.msn for their domain name?
what I propose does have one sticky point: who should charge for the registration services and what is to be done with that money; any ideas?
ISOC should do this. Hand over the Internic to ISOC, get them to charge a small fee for transactions that will cover all expenses plus allow for improvements in registry and directory services such as using modern database technology to manage the system.
come up with unique two-level names; it is quite feasible to have domain name servers for hundreds of thousands of names in one hierarchy, those who say it isn't are either lazy or incompetent or don't know what they are talking about (and I'm talking about good, reliable, fast servers here).
Modern database technology on striped disk arrays can handle the entire world's population using a 1 level domain; pick a number between 1 and 6 billion. Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-542-4130 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com