Sounds to me like at its core new.net is taking advantage of the obvious frustration that some of us feel with the techno-political "establishment", using the discontent as a springboard to an eventual hijack of the root zone. I don't think they have any intention of seeing themselves as an alternate. It seems the ticket is to muddle the issues by labeling every argument for one root "political", thus "unsavory" and offensive to many folks' more-egalitarian vision of the Internet. new.net offers "freedom from oppression", but in its own right is nothing but an old spin on an old play. Create enough FUD about the establishment, then get a few partners to commit to the "new.net" namespace, and if you have enough subscribers you can negotiate with ICANN. It seems new.net is taking lessons from Microsoft: - berate the common standards - create lots of dust - rape the standards of their essence - create exclusivity with proprietary extensions to the standards - appeal to the lowest common denominators of human expression (in this case, .xxx says it all) - partner with like-minded souls seeing the same pot of gold at the end - fight like hell to get a critical mass of subscribers to the idea (through any means possible) - negotiate the altered standards back into the mainstream Why do this? Money. Position. Microsoft is an excellent model for building a profitable business. Only one problem. Rape the DNS, and the whole house comes down. You might as well be running IRC. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen Kowalchuk skowalchuk@diamonex.com Diamonex, Incorporated ...learning cannot be controlled; it is out of control by design. Learning emerges spontaneously, it proceeds in an individualistic and unpredictable way, and it achieves its goal in its own good time. Once triggered, [it] will not stop--unless it is hijacked by conditioning. -- Roger Fouts --------------------------------------------------------------------------