for the sex sites, i'm not sure that .sex would be in their best interest: after
all, a lot of websites get customers simply by having similar names - like mimicking
among animals... i remember years ago Time reporting webcralwer.com, a sex search
engine, as a danger to random surfers who weren't careful about their typing (although
webcralwer actually maintained a clean front page, with at the time a message saying
that the search engine was down... but a search box was still available. odd. but
clean.) Although categorization with an increased set of names would allow us
to hunt for websites more easily, we'll probably wind up with an exponential growth
rate on tld's from companies wanting to mimic, or maybe provide all possible alternatives
(typographical errors, etc.) in order to attract customers to their own websites
(especially among companies selling similar products, with names that can be easily
mistaken.) We'll have to have some regulating body at that point, maybe more so than
now, just to try to keep them from mis-using the new names... but what, really, constitutes
a misuse? Does my use of, say, black-cat-with-stripes.orbital entail that I should
be a moon, that looks like a black cat with strips? (Note the article a few days
ago on slashdot about the Mars dedicated network satelite, hopefully to be connected
to the Internet somehow.) Of course, Verisign hasn't been doing a good job anyway...
so frankly, I doubt we'd be able to rely on them to take on the new responsibilities
brought on by such a free system. The other possibility is complete deregulation,
with DNS servers all around the world agreeing to free transfers of new domain names,
etc., backing each other up, distributing the load, and maintaining current lookup
tables... but that would require even more sanity on their part...-Philip
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