Rob,
Yep, to break out of the current benefits of a single root one had better
be able to offer an appealing alternative. Centraal may be building enough
momentum to do this; my own thought has been that the browser makers are
perfectly positioned to make the play and are quietly trying to do so: see
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/netizen.html?pg=5>.
Imagine if the 99.9% relied-upon namespace were wholly run by Netscape or
Microsoft. Would that be a victory for the private market, or would
everyone be looking for ways to be fair about capturing the value of those
names instead of letting Netscape or Microsoft auction them off? ...JZ
At 01:58 PM 7/14/99 , Rob Raisch wrote:
> > 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?
Jon Zittrain
Executive Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
