Re: PAB The Green Paper and competing registries

Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com)
Tue, 24 Feb 1998 10:08:32 -0500


Jim Dixon writes:
> What you deleted was my "real life argument": a change in policy
> regarding registrations in .UK caused a large shift out of .COM and
> into .UK -- despite a higher price.

Frankly, the shift is one anyone could have predicted (i.e. that you
got more registrations in .UK when the process got less boneheaded),
and is utterly irrelevant to the fact that a company like, say,
Netscape, has millions of dollars invested in their domain name and is
unlikely to be willing to change it from netscape.com to
netscape.foo. The issue of domain name "entrapment" and the fact that
a monopoly manager of a TLD is in a very nasty position is orthogonal.

The American experience with 800 numbers, before and after 800 number
portability, is, I believe, fully instructive.

Now that we've disposed of the issue, could we please QUIT TALKING
ABOUT IT AND GET ON TO DEALING WITH IRA MAGAZINER?

Or, Jim, is your goal here to distract us sufficiently that we get
nothing done?

Perry