David,
I am not so much addressing you personally here, but am trying to make
some general points.
In message <000b01be680a$0d2f06e0$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "David Schutt" writes:
> Yes, I agree. Confusing, because I don't think everyone is using the same
> concepts and definitions. In fact, I know they aren't.
And, this is done deliberately, by some. K*nt, for one.
> > What makes you think that one can "purchase" a domain name? Or that
> > you need to "purchase" rights to control your own name space?
> Currently, you can't. And I'm not really claiming that domain names
> -should- be purchased, just that they could. The possibility of an
> economic transaction demonstrates that there is a transferrable
> right there.
What I mean, is that the original registrant doesn't purchase, but he
can sell it of course.
> Yes, I understand this. I run a rather small network, some of it is
> owned by Speco, some of it is owned by me, and some of it is
> equipment and services purchased from other organizations. The only
> mechanism I have for identifying this administrative grouping, and
> advertising it to the outside world is the speco.com domain
> name.
You are not advertising it. You are entering the domain name into a
technical database, that was created because IP numbers are too
difficult to remember.
> Speco.com is valuable to us. It is potentially valuable to others,
> too. A representative of another Speco offered to buy speco.com, we
> could have transferred the right to use the name to them for
> monetary consideration, but we didn't.
Ah, but for the Web. Before HTML, nobody could care less, now that
even marketing managers think they know what a Web page is it's a
market.
> There is a transferrable right, it can (doesn't have to be) be part
> of an economic transaction.
Sure, but the point is, that it doesn't originate at IANA or ICANN,
but at you. So you don't have to purchase the right from IANA. You
rent space in their data base for your property, so to say.
> > > There is precedent for this, that is the way the root has been
> > > handled. The only difference is that the transfer of rights to the
> > > namespace was done without exchanging money.
> >
> > This is nonsense. There has never, ever, been a transfer of
> > rights. Postel was running around with a notebook in the beginning,
> > then one registry and now only because of the growth are we looking
> > at shared registries.
>
> But it was Postel's notebook, wasn't it? And wasn't the service that
> he provided usefull, people agreed to use it, and because of that it
> had value to them?
But it was your name he entered. You didn't have to purchase it from
him. You just rented a page in his notebook.
It's like renting billboard space.
> And I suspect that Postel did control the right to make entries in
> that notebook, that he didn't just let anybody make entries
> willy-nilly. When that notebook got full, it became an index to
> entries in other notebooks. And instead of trying to maintain all
> the notebooks himself, he delegated the right to make entries in
> those other notebooks to someone else. This was a transfer of
> rights. What made Postel special is that he didn't make money part
> of the transaction, he did it as a public service.
Quite agreed, but he never owned any domain name and gave them to you
for free, you owned it and he entered it and carried it around for
anyone to read, for free. :-)-O
> > And, of course because there is money in it, it's actually obscene how
> > much money one can make from doing nothing (annual fee for not
> > deleting an entry), the registrars have developed a feeding frenzies.
>
> This is part of the point that I was trying to make. There is no
> reason that there has to be an annual fee to keep an entry in a
> notebook. Once the entry is made, there is no reason why it can't
> just sit there. It seems a bit like extortion to continuously charge
> for not deleting the name.
I am not against charging an annual fee, per se, infrastructure needs
to be maintained, replaced, salaries need to be paid and so on.
In particular have I no sympathy to commercial entities who pass this
on to their customers anyway, so at least the registry knows the
entity is still around and interested. All the rest (the posturing,
threats, holding cells and so on) is just administrivia.
> If that entry is used by someone to provide a service, then that
> service is something that might be charged for on a continuing
> basis. Keeping the the entry does -not- have to be tied to the
> provision of name resolution service.
I am in total agreement.
> > Personally I think registrars are parasites, but as long as anyone has
> > a choice between registering directly (which requires some capacity
> > building) or through a registrar ($$$) I couldn't give a dead rat's
> > fuzzy behind (Who wrote that quote?).
> Here is where I think I'm not getting the point across. I'm talking
> about a different separation of functions than the one that is
> commonly referred to as Registry/Registrar. The way it is defined
> now, the registry both controls the notebook and provides the
> continuing service. (name resolution service).
The Root Registry (NSI) only needs to provide the Primary. All
Secondaries can be done by commercial (by whatever model) and/or by
non-profit entities as in the past.
> The Registrar is a sales agent for the Registry. There is no reason
> why what we commonly refer to now as a registry has to both control
> the notebook and provide the service. Of course, service providers
> can have sales agents or resellers if they wish, but that is
> entirely their business and almost irrelevant to anything else.
I am in total agreement.
Database/Notebook
Name Service/Root Servers
Registrars
> > Of course you can sell the rights
> > to your domaim. You just don't have to purchase it in the first place.
> I think we are closer than it appears. I would like to see the whole
> system function more like the root has always been handled. And no,
> I don't think money necessarily has to be involved. The fact that
> these all -could- be economic transactions only helps to clarify the
> underlying concepts, at least for me.
I prefer to approach this from the technical side, for which it was
intended. I am not against creating an industry, but creating
unecessary layers makes this unecessarily expensive.
I am not against Registrars per se, the ones that want to use them
WYGIWYD (as in LaTeX, What You Get Is What You Deserve), I do not want
to be *FORCED* to use one.
As a ccTLD Administrator I have some experience with Registrars, most
of it extremely bad (they as a rule hire dyslexic staff who can not
fill in a simple template and read the documentation provided
thereto).
el
