At 12/19/01 1:29 PM, William X Walsh wrote: >I stand by my statement then and now, first come first served, no >sunrise or landrush preregistration periods, is the only fair method >of doing it.
But that's the same thing as "he with the most money wins", because the way you would guarantee a good chance is by signing up with many registrars, or with companies working somewhat like SnapNames that promised you many connection attempts. And each of them would charge you a whole bunch of money. Heck, even OpenSRS offered premium submissions for .info, guaranteeing that for some extra money you'd get more cracks at being "first come" and therefore improve your chances of being "first served". First come, first served sounds good in theory, but is not fair in practice when one person can submit a virtually infinite number of requests for a limited resource. That's how Verisign does the daily drops, and that process isn't fair. The only way you get dropped names is by paying SnapNames or someone an extra fee to increase your chances of being first at the expense of people who haven't spent the money. First come, first served works in the real world for concert tickets, etc., because there's only one of you. Sure, you can maybe convince some friends to stand in line for you, or redial TicketMaster over and over with a demon dialer, but that's still limited. Imagine if any person could make virtually unlimited simultaneous phone calls to TicketMaster to increase their chances of being first -- that's the situation we're dealing with for domain names. It simply can't work; without some limiting factor, the demand will be close to infinite and you'll have a fiasco; the people with resources to create larger infinities will win. Everyone seems to think that their preferred method of allocating new TLDs is the One True Fair Method, but I submit there *IS* no method of allocating limited resources that are in near-infinite demand without limiting it by "unfairly" favoring people who are blessed with something extra, where that something is money, time, bandwidth, trademarks, willingness to commit fraud, or what have you, depending on what scheme you come up with. (Note that "no limits" is the same policy as "limiting it to people who have the most bandwidth" in practice, as most connection attempts will be rejected.) Maybe people should be required to hand-write their domain name request on a 3x5 card and send it, one per envelope, via physical mail. This would be inefficient, but that very inefficiency is what makes it desirable. The efficiency of the online/computer world, where you can automate the repetition of a task such as filling out applications, is what causes the problem of near-infinite demand. But even then you're just "unfairly" favoring people with lots of free time and low postage rates to the destination. Anyway, rather than artificially limiting demand, perhaps people should look at the other end and increase the supply. If ICANN released 200 new TLDs of approximately equal value at the same time, the supply might come closer to matching the demand for once. (Of course, as far as I'm concerned, there is no need for new TLDs anyway. People bitch when their .com name is taken, but they're still better off with a less desirable .com name instead of a different suffix. When you say ".com", that is a convenient shorthand consumers understand. You can tell them to go to "www.example.cc" until the cows come home, and they'll still type "www.example.com" into their Web browser the next day; the registrant should have chosen "www.example-oklahoma.com" or something instead. But I realize this point of view is a particularly vile form of heresy to most, and anyway, who am I to stand in the path of "progress"....) Or something. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
