[NA-Discuss] Fwd: Edits and comments to NARALO/ALAC position statement on GAC scorecard
Eric Brunner-Williams
ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net
Fri Apr 1 01:46:04 UTC 2011
> ... Anyone in NY who wants a city-specific domain has had new-york.ny.us
> available for over a decade. ...
Back in the late IANA management period I looked at who owned what and
found that six people owned over half of the major US metro media markets.
When I wrote NeuStar's application for .us, a bid which the US DoC
selected, I proposed to end this cyber-squatting on networks-of-cities
scale. I was away from the office for something, and upon my return I
found that NeuStar management had been convinced of a plan, a plan
named after the two colors used on the whiteboard, to retain these
parties in their networks of cybersquatting as "regional registrars"
or some brain damaged thing, so that the growth and development of the
dotted -- and free under the DoC contract -- side of .us would be
retarded, and the flat side of .us would grow due to the dead ends of
the hierarchies under the squatted-name.state.us stubs.
There have been some intelligent uses of the dotted side, but only for
names the IANA management period squatters didn't bother to grab, for
free, at the time, so my former co-worker at the OSF Research
Institute put up harvard.ma.us for the _town_ of Harvard.
In their not very serious bid when the .us contract was up for
renewal, GoDaddy could have, but failed to offer to reform the
hierarchical .us name space.
Flat name spaces mean more money to registries and registrars, so no
shortage of junk has impeded the development of hierarchical name
spaces, though they are quite successful under .edu, .mil, .gov, .uk, ...
Eric
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