At 5/16/01 11:32 PM, David Hernand wrote:
>It is quite unfortunate that you view New.net as "competition" to whatever
>group of persons or companies that you might represent.
Unfortunately I represent only myself and the small group of labrador
retrievers sitting at my feet, who nonetheless wholeheartedly embrace my
opinions. However, they also wholeheartedly embrace eating cat faeces, so
let's say for the sake of argument that I represent only myself.
That's plenty, though. I believe in selling my customers a stable,
reliable Internet service they can count on to work 99.9% of the time or
better. New.net's domains don't meet those standards, so I would not be
interested in becoming a reseller for your company, which therefore makes
you "competition" to me and my pets, as you are presumably interested in
convincing potential customers to buy your domains instead of the
ICANN-sanctioned OpenSRS domains I sell.
>Is
>this any different than the introduction of any new technology? Is this any
>different than frustrations experienced by users of new Internet products
>everyday? It is a little disingenuous to apply a much higher standard to
>our initiatives than is routinely applied to other new technology
>businesses.
That argument would make sense if domain names were a new technology.
Unfortunately they've been around for many years, and everyone else's
product works fine -- it's only your company's domains that have trouble,
even when judged by the same low standard I use to judge ICANN domains
(i.e., "Do they work right when my customers type them?").
>You mentioned .kids, which is a great example of how a private company can
>act quickly to provide a public benefit in the domain name space where a
>public entity cannot. ICANN rejected .kids because of the lack of political
>or community consensus surrounding how .kids should be used. These are
>important issues that are very difficult for a quasi-governmental entity to
>get its arms around and make a decision. As a private company, however, we
>decided to make .kids domain names available today
This logic is akin to "I didn't like the way everyone else was arguing
about where to sit around the dinner table, so I went ahead and ate
everything on the dessert tray."
>Others may
>come along in the future and do a better job than us with .kids, but we are
>attempting to do it today. We do not and could not claim exclusive
>ownership of .kids or any other top level domain.
So if you're not claiming exclusive ownership of it from a DNS resolution
perspective, then you're encouraging the idea that other competing
registries could attempt to simultaneously offer .kids domains, and each
ISP would pick and choose the root servers (or other system) used to
resolve each domain name, and the free market will decide who wins and
loses?
So "www.example.kids" might resolve to a totally different site for
someone using Earthlink dialup than for someone on AOL dialup, depending
on which competing registry each ISP chooses to embrace? Or which browser
plugin the user has most recently downloaded?
That sounds like madness.
Again, I apologize for drawing out this thread, but I believe these
issues directly affect OpenSRS resellers. New.net is a direct competitor
to any of us who do not become New.net resellers, and their actions, if
successful, threaten to balkanize and destabilize the system we've worked
so hard to get consumers to trust during domain name deregulation.
--
Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
