Gordon Cook a �crit:
>
> bear in mind that as of this summer the US postal service had and likely
> still does have designs on it.... they had gone so far as to sit down with
> jon postell early last year and somebody went so far as to plant a
> fradulent story on one of the mecklermedia rags saying that the Reston IFWP
> meeting endorsed the postal services claims....
>
> Now I will have to admit that i did not know about any DNRC proposal... I'd
> be surprised if such isn't a helluva lot better than what the USPS would do
> with the domain.
>
> some one should smoke out those (USPS ) folk fast or there could be a nasty
> surprise.
Thanks for bringing this up. The USPS proposal will be a major issue
at the NTIA meeting, I expect. Common sense ought to show everyone,
even the USG, how absurd it is to identify e-mail addresses with
street addresses, given the rate at which people change their abode,
if nothing else. But then common sense doesn't seem to often
prevail, in what concerns the Internet. And e-commerce will be in
favor of the USPS proposal because it extends the geographical
identification of people using the Internet, so that they can be
made the subject of combined e-mail/snailmail advertising. And, who
knows?, WIPO might also back the USPS, since keeping track of
people's mailing addresses will help the trademark lawyers serve
their reverse-hijacking processes on domain name holders. So, yes,
the USPS proposal, as inane as it may be, is a matter of serious
concern.
The DNRC proposal is to make .US available to all entities,
including individuals, on a no-fee or low-fee basis, and to have it
administered by a quasi-governmental agency, hopefully one more
accountable than IANA has been in the past, and one which will be
mandated to explore and experiment with the possibilities of
extending the use of .US.
The DNRC proposal can be found at
http://www.domain-name.org/usdomain.html. Its submission to the NTIA
was a major impetus for the USG's present .US reorganization effort,
and is basic reading for anyone attending the March 9th meeting.
