The fewer 2LDs and the more generic they are, the more conflicts arise
and the greater they become in value, leading to more untoward
activities such as domain speculation and cyber-squatting. This is what
has happened with .com - just look at the number of UDRP disputes and
the dollar values being placed on such domains in the secondary market.
Such activities diminish greatly as you move away from .com to other
extensions such as .biz, .info, etc. and hardly occurs at all in the
industry specific domains such as .aero, .museum, etc.
While the original purpose of the DNS was to provide a static, human
friendly reference point to an IP address, it has since gone well beyond
this simple addressing purpose to one of branding, marketing and
intellectual property. Try telling a room of marketing executives and IP
lawyers that the DNS is not a directory service, they'll think your the
comedian doing the warm up before the real speaker begins - of course
people expect to find Microsoft at microsoft.com and CocaCola at coke.com.
People have come to expect that when they type in xyz.com or xyz.com.au
that it is the official website of XYZ, they don't expect it to be a
.net, .org etc. The .com / .com.au extension has lost its original
meaning and has taken on a generic meaning of "the official website", so
much so that people even expect the official website of charities to end
in a .com / .com.au not .org / .org.au.
Although this started as a perception issue with the public, it has
gained real substance as domain dispute decisions re-enforce the fact
that .com / .com.au should be the official website.
auDA inherited a flawed namespace, largely derived on the ICANN model.
If auDA does not address these flaws they will become increasingly
irrelevant and it will be the dispute proceedings, courtrooms and the IP
lawyers who decide the eligibility and allocation of domain names.
The current model is not future-proof and it will lead to an ever
increasing number of conflicts and issues such as domain speculation.
This needs to be addressed.
We don't need thousands of 2LDs but it does make sense to introduce many
more, especially for larger and more important industries such as banks,
TV, radio, etc. The more 2LDs and the more specific they are the more
open the namespace is, with fewer conflicts and less domain speculation.
Doug Robb wrote:
There has been some good follow up on this post below but as someone
who has dealt with categorization of information for many years let me
tell you it is not easy to develop even a mildly decent scheme when
the number of categories become large and the information being
organized is quite disparate -- and more importantly you discover you
need to put the same entity in more than one category (often this is
thrust upon you because the entities activities span multiple categories).
Just try and look up something a bit unusual in the yellow pages to
see what I mean. So for my two cents worth you want a minimal number
of 2LD's and given the problems raised already it's too late to
consider direct registration of .au domain especially given the
likelihood people will try and create precisely the structure below
but without any hope of a coherent, consistent approach - and thus
rendering the namespace a logical mess -- not one thing or another.
However not all is lost because even if this did happen -- my final
point -- and it was made in the first discussion we ever had on this
list is that the DNS is not a directory service. Now go to your
nearest window, open it and shout to the world "The DNS is not a
directory service!"
The purpose of a domain name is simply to provide a static, human
friendly reference point to an IP address which can be found by the
DNS system. The whole notion that domain names should somehow be
organized as some sort of on-line equivalent of the yellow pages has
always stuck me as quite misguided.
Yes we all want a catchy, easy to remember 'top of mind' name (like
dare I say clarity.com.au) but this not the same as trying to organize
everything around you into some sort of category based structured
directory -- with all the failings previously mentioned.
If you think about it your domain name could be random numbers or
characters and the job of finding you -- and everything one would
possibly want to know about you - would be much better done by a real
directory service. The next Google .....
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