I believe that the time is right for a personal name registry, however I do not believe
that this proposal addresses a serious issue which is that of inclusively - it cannot
offer EVERY applicant a memorable personal address.
How will the registry
offer a memorable address to multiple people with the same name? There are over 10,000
people in just the UK with the name 'John Smith', how many of them could have a .nom
address.Clearly, 'John Smith' is a worst case name, but in the UK there are over
100 people sharing even the 40,000th most popular full name. Since the US shares
a similar nameset to the UK I would guess that even with the introduction of middle
initials and forenames there will not be enough names to go around.
This application
proposes 10 options, but of these only options 1, 7, 8, 9 look usable (are formats
surname.middlename.name, middlename.surname.name or forename.middlename.name actually
attractive?) and options 2 and 3 exacerbate the problem by overloading other names
(ie if 'Steven Martin Anderson' is allocated 'steve.martin.name' or 'martin.anderson.name'
then all that has happened is that the options remaining for someone called 'Steve
Martin' or 'Martin Anderson' are reduced)
Whilst nicknames can be used to increase
the number of available domain, these will only really be attractive to young people.
Those over 30, or those who want to use their personal domain in their professional
lives are unlikely to want to use nicknames.
I believe that this is a key issue
because if a personal name registry can only offer an attractive domain name to the
first handful of individuals with each name then
a) it is not a global naming resource
open to all
b) there will be a fast 'land grab' when the registry is opened up
because there will demonstrably only be a restricted number of attractive domain
names
Could Global Name Registry please explain how it proposes to address this.
Thank you