Tony,
Thank you for stripping a sentence out of the context, and starting a
completely different reasonment that does not take into account the matter
under debate.
This gives me the chance to answer to the new problem you address, i.e. "The
justification of the regulation".
The need for regulation comes naturally when in a game the predominance of
the interests of one part (usually small) of the players constitutes an
objective obstacle to the development of other forces, that would be
beneficial to the global wealth.
Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more clear that this is the case for
the Internet.
In principle, NSi should be the first company to be happy of having an
expansion of the domain name space: they have the widest share of the
market, and by providing a good service they could make sure not only to
attract future customers, but, more important, to be the first choice for
their happy customers who already registered under .com, .org, .net, and
that would register under new gTLDs.
But something happened, that I would call the "uncle Scroogy" syndrome: the
recent actions from NSi seem to me more in the direction of keeping the
monopoly than preparing for the new competitive market that will
(eventually) rise from this monopolistic situation.
And this is exactly the situation that yielded in the past to regulatory
actions.
There will be no (or at least less) temptation to artificially limit via
regulation the power of one player over the others if the monopolistic
player does not give the impression of artificially increasing its
competitive edge by playing unfairly.
Down to the detail, about the matter to be regulated, I only see two major
issues:
- how to grant access to other players to the game (i.e. how are the
registrars being "certified", how are new gTLDs (Registries) approved, ...)
- how to ensure that international law will prevail over national laws, that
will inevitably protect national businesses over foreign
Regards
Roberto
You wrote:
> At 06:05 AM 4/2/99 , Roberto Gaetano wrote:
>
>
>
> The Internet is becoming more and more the carrier of very important
> exchanges.
> E-Commerce is a reality that is involving billions of $$$, and it
> would not
> be wise to leave the matter unregulated (or regulated only by
> national laws,
> that are different in different countries).
>
>
> This is a wonderful concept -- a justification
> for regulating everything.
>
> Certainly you would want to begin with carriers
> and web site operators.� Name pointer services
> are almost trivial by comparison.� Although there,
> since AOL has the biggest zone on the Internet,
> you would want to start with them first.�
>
> Let's subject everyone to pre-approval business
> plan review, licensing, performance monitoring,
> reporting, and biannual review.� Now let's see,
> who has such a plan.� :-)
>
> Adding all that international law on top of those
> national laws will also really help things along.
>
> Guess this will make things safe and sanitized
> for ECommerce.
>
>
> --tony
