"William X. Walsh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> I won't get into the spam discussion here. Spam is annoying, for
> sure, but so is junk mail and telemarketing. It's just something you
> have to learn to live with.
>
We're back to personal beliefs here again, opinions that people are lax to
change, and that invariably lead to arguments that will never be resolved.
Which is a pity really, but that's people for you I guess.
For example, I don't agree with your sentiment above - that we should learn
to live with spam, junk mail and telemarketing - at all, by any manner of
means. I think they're all something people should actively try to stop.
For the most part, all they do is clutter up the mail service, people's
doorways, the phone lines and of course the Internet. I don't know about you,
but I've never responded to any kind of direct marketing, ever, unless it was
solicited - i.e. I asked for it.
And spam is even worse because it shifts the burden of cost onto the
recipient, rather than the sender. We shouldn't have to *pay* to view these
ads, for products and services we don't want - will probably never
want. "Learning to live with it" is - in my opinion - the wrong attitude to
take about it.
> But the fact is that domain speculators and resellers are not scum,
> and are in fact signs of a healthy market in the internet economy, as
> speculators and traders are in other markets.
>
See, again we differ. I don't believe that domain names should *be*
a "market", a commodity to be bought and sold. It goes against everything I
believe in. Haven't commercial entities done enough to damage the Internet
already? I mean the Internet now, not eBusinesses. There's a difference.
> What is annoying for some is that they can't get names they want at
> the lowest possible price. My answer is that first come first served
> works, and anything beyond that you expect to pay market value for,
> and that's not always the cheapest price.
>
I agree that people can't get domain names for the lowest market price, but I
believe that it's domain speculators that are mostly to blame for that. There
are hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of domain names out there
sitting on parked pages, or not resolving at all. Sites could be developed on
those domain names, if it wasn't for these people, sites that might do a hell
of a lot better if they had the domain name they wanted, the domain name they
deserved. This is the heart of my argument - the speculators, particularly
the speculators who aggregate domains, are adversely affecting the Internet.
> This is also a good argument for continuing expansion of the
> namespace.
>
It is and it isn't William. I agree that the namespace should be expanded -
as a matter of fact, I believe that it should be expanded even more rapidly,
for precisely that reason. But unfortunately, it won't stop the aggregators.
Hopefully it'll hurt them to some extent though.
adam
