Alexei Roudnev <alex@relcom.net> wrote: On Monday, March 19, 2001 6:35 PM (AEST)

(you can even live without DNS at all - use search engine instead... It's not effective but possible yet).

Hi Alexei Perhaps what you're talking about here is a "yellow pages" directory structure that bypasses domain names and goes straight to IP addresses. If so, why not? But there are other ways to communicate without domain names and this issue was raised at the ICANN conference in Melbourne by Andrew Pam during the public forum in the afternoon of Tuesday the 13th March. Unfortunately nobody, particularly Vint Cerf, seemed to appreciate the importance of question that was being raised. Later I spoke to Andrew privately and he explained the workings of ICQ. Which I understand is a method of communication that doesn't use the DNS. Best regards Patrick Corliss