> So what's stopping market forces, as you say, from creating the nicely
> nested (but still not completely overlapping) competitive set of DNS
> services? I'd imagine only the market itself so far--which has been known
> to miss good opportunities in the space, to be sure. ...JZ
The infamous chicken-and-egg.
Consumers have no compelling reason for access to alternative roots since
there are no compelling properties which can be reached solely through them.
This is why I favor a bottom-up strategy of providing some product or
service of strong, general value that relies upon access to the alternate
roots for its operation. This is exactly the path Centraal has taken with
its RealNames service to accomplish the exact same goal from a competely
commercial perspective. No one seems to realize that RealNames is well on
the way to becoming an autonomous, independent alternate name service.
I am unwilling to award Centraal this victory without a fight since to do so
would only create two slightly differing monopolies in place of the one
under which we currently labor. I don't think anyone noticed or cared that
NSI in an investor in Centraal...I wonder why?
--
Rob Raisch CTO - RivalWorks, Inc. <http://www.rivalworks.com>
Who do you want to play today?
