Why Preregistrations Shouldn't Stand

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Username: jrosenthal

Date/Time: Mon, July 3, 2000 at 1:20 AM GMT

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Subject: Why Preregistrations Shouldn't Stand

Message:

If anybody needs to see why .web preregistrations through IOD should not stand, please take a look at the following page:
http://www.Math.Net/brittan.com.webnames.html
It makes absolutely no sense to let preregistrations stand when speculators (or cybersquatters as some might call them) have already registered such a large amount of generic domains.
If the preregistrations are wiped out, of course there will be a big rush to register them once they are available, but you will not see one person getting all the "good" names like Marc Brittan has done.
Cybersquatters are going to register domains no matter what, however I'd rather see 50 cybersqatters owning the domains seen at that site than 1 Marc Brittan owning them all. Or should we just hand over the .web namespace to Mr. Brittan and the other dozen or so people whose names frequently show up while searching the webtld.com "registry" for generic domains?
If we start the new gTLD registrations with a clean slate, everybody will have had an equal opportunity and nobody will be able to claim that they were at a disadvantage.
As for all this (uninformed) talk about people using scripts to register all the good domains on the first day of registration, this can easily be averted if the registration systems are built correctly.