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Username: Kirk Knight
Date/Time: Fri, November 10, 2000 at 8:55 PM GMT
Browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer V5.0 using Macintosh
Score: 5
Subject: it's not about money, it's about communication

Message:
 

 
I'm sitting in Shanghai at 4:30 am reading this forum and am
stunned at ICANN's narrow minds.  I can't believe how similar it
is to reading a report from the Chinese Government that grants
valuable rights to a friend of the Minister and ignores everyone
else.

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". It's a
terrible aphorism, but ICANN has NSI and seems determined to
find more NSI's rather than consider alternatives.

The web is global. It's 24/7. And it's about communications, not
money.

The fact that people are arguing about the proper fee  for
registering a domain, and that the value of your inventory of
names has gone down in value, is utterly bankrupt.

URLs are meant to foster communications. We could really
benefit from open communications here in China, not to mention
most developing countries.

I quote fromICANN:
   As the Names Council explained, "any roll-out [of new TLDs]
must not jeopardize the stability of the Internet." Cf. Report (Part
One) of Working Group C (stating that "most [Working Group C]
members felt than an initial commitment to many more that 6-10
[new TLDs] would not be operationally sound.").

Why not more? What if the addition of a new TLD did not
jeopardize the stability of the Internet?  Is 6 enough, is 10 too
many?

ICANN has taken a very narrow view of how DNS can function
and grow by looking through the lens of NSI.  I suggest we all
open our minds a bit, toss out the land rush mentality, and
explore some counter-intuitive approaches to naming. 

For example, the .yp approach (Monsoon Assets) has a single
domain. That's it.  Yet it scales several orders of magnitude
more than traditional TLDs in other ways.  You don't clutter DNS
if you only have a single domain, so it imposes a fraction of  the
burden of adding another TLD. I'll bet few people read the
proposal. It's likely the ICANN folks didn't comprehend it, based
upon their comments. It's also assured the business folks didn't
grasp the simplicity as they missed it completely. 

If ICANN was going to permit only 6-10 TLDs they should have
published this before those of us who believed in open and
global communicaons took money out of our kids' college funds.
At least then we would have known that only ICANN's closest
friends would be included.

In China, we call this kind of relationship "guanxi". It's what's kept
Party officials in nice cars and expensive suits and everybody
else scrambling to fill their rice bowl.

Kirk Knight
member of .yp team Monsoon Asssets
     
     

 


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