Scarcity of TLDs

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Sun, Aug 23, 1998 at 12:15:15PM -0400, Mikki Barry wrote:
[...]
>And, of course, the reason is because the radio and television spectrum has 
>been mandated a "public resource" and the argument of scarcity has been used.  
>No such scarcity in TLDs except that artificially requested by trademark 
>interests. 

1) there are many other services besides commercial radio and tv 
managed under this paradigm

2) the total channel capacity allows for tens, maybe hundreds of 
thousands of channels

3) no responsible person believes it is wise to add hundreds of thousands
of new TLDs any time soon, perhaps forever.  This is for reasons like
operational stability, and has nothing to do with trademark interests.  
There is in fact a semi-official IETF/IAB statement on this matter, 
and it is fairly clear on this matter.

Therefore, the "scarcity" of radio spectrum is commensurate with the 
scarcity of TLDs, and if "scarcity" were sufficient justification to 
declare the radio spectrum a public resource, the same argument would 
hold for the TLD space.

The arguments that there is unlimited TLD space stem from the
combinatoric arithmetic of the number of possible character
combinations.  However, combinatorics is not the limiting factor, by a
long shot.  An very close analogy exists with the electromagnetic
spectrum -- there are huge number of frequency ranges that *might* be
used, but practical considerations limit their use.  New technology
(eg, spread spectrum) might find ways to circumvent these limits, just
as future changes might be made to the operational DNS.  But current
practical limitations are what govern in both cases

So, to sum up:  TLDs are a limited resource, to roughly the same degree the 
the EM spectrum is.  I do agree, however, that the restrictions 
proposed by trademark interests are purely policy-based, and have
no operational basis as far as DNS is concerned.

-- 
Kent Crispin, PAB Chair			"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html