At 11:30 PM 3/29/99 -0800, Bill Lovell wrote:
>At 01:21 AM 3/21/99 -0800, William X. Walsh wrote:
>> As you can see from this sample of a post to the Isp-Webhosting list (and
>> significant discussion is also on-going on the Isp-Tech and other related
>> lists) that ISPs are seriously and significantly concerned as well. This
>> has been the busiests thread on these lists today.
>
>I especially love the phrase "we have made a name for ourselves." Actually,
>they made four, at taxpayer expense, i.e., .com, .org, . . . you know the rest.
I understand its imposible to say this without appearing to be an apologist for NSI
but let's look at this in the cold light of day.
A long time ago in a place far far away, .com, net, org, int, gov, edu and the
two letter domains were made.
Poeple quickly found that everything except com had rules that made it
sometimes difficult, someimtes impossible, sometimes unbelievebaly slow
to register a name[1]. com net and org succeeded (the IANA run .int has 56 entries
after 10 years, and lets not forget the phantom palestine.int with no contacts
listed) because of the way the poeple running it ran it. They made it easy
and fast to get a name.
As a one time American taxpayer, and looking at crap like 3 trillion dollars
for defense spending I certainly don't begrudge the various peoeple that ran
the Internic for the way they did it. The maybe $10M that it took to bootstrap
it was a tremendous success IMO, and not a waste at all.
Most NSF priograms for new technology funded it on the premise that the
contractor must find a way to be self supporting after a while. The idea
was to make a business out of whatever they were doing under a grant.
<shrug>
[1] Bruce Becker tried to get gts.ca for his network in 1990. Three months
later he was told by the .CA committee "No. But you can have gts.tor.on.ca."
So he said "screw that" and got gts.net.
--
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"Those who give up a little freedom for a little security
will not have, nor do they deserve, either one"
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