[NA-Discuss] Fwd: Edits and comments to NARALO/ALAC position statement on GAC scorecard

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

> ... 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