Good idea.
>
>Having said such, my position is that the number of gTLDs should be
>increased. My primary reason for this is that the current crisis in the
>DNS/Trademark conflict needs alleviation by adopting actions that would
>decrease perceived property values in Domain names. We must be cautious,
>however, of the potential negative effects on user's ability to find
>websites, if there is a proliferation of TLDs. We should also be mindful
>of the dubious ability to permanently limit registrations under
>specialized TLDs in a competitive marketplace (of registries).
I also agree that the current number of gTLDs should be increased. It's
almost a necessity with the exponential increase in address-space
provided by IPv6.
A decrease in perceived value would also benefit in the short and long
term. It may also eliminate speculation and the cybersquatting debate.
However, I fear that the current trend of wanting to control one
'keyword' across all TLDs and pointing it towards one site will
continue, and may get worse, as famous mark bickering increases
(e.g., the owner of words.com, words.net, words.org, words.yourTLDhere
may get litigous over the individual who currently runs a site dedicated
to linguistics at words.foo, simply because it's the one TLD that Words,
Inc. doesn't yet have a DN in.)
And, I would argue that a very substantial portion of the net population
does not use memorable domain names. Instead, they rely upon search
engines and bookmark files. True, www.mustang.com is easier to
remember than www.fordmustang.com. However, I'd wager that a great
deal of visitors got there from a search engine or previously saved
bookmark (likely discovered via search engine) than from typing the
URL into the browser. Given this, the argument over the value of
'memorable' domain names becomes somewhat moot.
-- Mark C. Langston NewCo News: Let your voice be heard: mark@bitshift.org http://www.bitshift.org http://www.idno.org Systems Admin http://www.icann.org San Jose, CA http://www.dnso.org - This message was sent via the IDNO-DISCUSS mailing list. To unsubscribe, send a message containing the line "unsubscribe idno-discuss" to majordomo@idno.org. For more information, see http://www.idno.org/