-> .com by "Richard J. Sexton" -> Re: .com by Michael Dillon -> Re: .com by perry@piermont.com -> Re: .com by "Richard J. Sexton" -> Re: .com by perry@piermont.com -> Re: .com by perry@piermont.com -> Re: .com by Michael Dillon -> Re: .com by Keith Winstein -> Re: .com by Michael Dillon -> Re: .com by Simon Higgs -> Re: .com by perry@piermont.com -> Re: .com by Michael Dillon -> Re: .com by Michael Dillon -> Re: .com by perry@piermont.com -> Re: .com by perry@piermont.com -> Re: .com by Dan Busarow -> Re: .com by Michael Dillon -> Re: .com by Simon Higgs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 12:44:49 -0700 From: "Richard J. Sexton" Subject: .com Newtwork Dissolutions is going to go public. It was bad enough they charged $50 per name to register into the dns; this severely limits the abily of people to make informaiton freely available in an organized basis using the dns as a named calulus to facilitate this. Is there any consensus whether .com should be a shared domain? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 12:58:06 -0700 From: Michael Dillon Subject: Re: .com On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Richard J. Sexton wrote: > Newtwork Dissolutions is going to go public. What makes you think this? There is nothing at www.netsol.com or www.saic.com about this. > It was bad enough they charged $50 per name to > register into the dns; this severely limits the abily > of people to make informaiton freely available > in an organized basis using the dns as a named > calulus to facilitate this. What's a calulus? Why can't you just give away a zillion third level domains of vrx.net? > Is there any consensus whether .com should be a shared > domain? Consensus is irrelevant. The NSF and NSI own .com. Period. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 13:20:41 -0700 From: perry@piermont.com Subject: Re: .com "Richard J. Sexton" writes: > Is there any consensus whether .com should be a shared > domain? I definitely think it can and should be. Perry ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 13:23:33 -0700 From: "Richard J. Sexton" Subject: Re: .com > > Newtwork Dissolutions is going to go public. > > What makes you think this? There is nothing at www.netsol.com or > www.saic.com about this. > So what. It's true. It's ben verifired. > > It was bad enough they charged $50 per name to > > register into the dns; this severely limits the abily > > of people to make informaiton freely available > > in an organized basis using the dns as a named > > calulus to facilitate this. > > What's a calulus? Why can't you just give away a zillion third level > domains of vrx.net? There are three levels to automation. The ability to manipulate somthing the abilty to manipulate something by numbr and the ability to manipulate something bya named calculus - a nameing system. There is a Chinese proverb: "The first step in organizing something is to name it properly". The mandate of thr WWW is "The embodiment of human information, online". As such, thre *name* is important. It has to be easy to rememeber and easy to type. All information online represents somewhat of an indexing problem. Alta Vista helps, but at somepoint, there will be so much informaiton that it won't be *much* help. At this point we revert to the DNS. Ideally, you should be able to type in http://www.subject.com and get information on that subject whether it's tractors or tomatoes. Poeple spend an inordinate amount of time putting up unformation for free for the general betterment of humanity - this is about more than just selling websites, which I do by neccessity, this is about makig a usable worls library. It does us all no good to build a free world library and then discover somebody y owns the card catalogues. > > Is there any consensus whether .com should be a shared > > domain? > > Consensus is irrelevant. The NSF and NSI own .com. Period. I don't believe thats true. Is this your opinion or is this a verifiable fact ? I was under the opinion that IANA is the guardian of .com, and frankly I've been a bit disappointed at the way they've been taking care of it lately. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 13:24:20 -0700 From: perry@piermont.com Subject: Re: .com Michael Dillon writes: > > Is there any consensus whether .com should be a shared > > domain? > > Consensus is irrelevant. The NSF and NSI own .com. Period. Actually, technically this is untrue. The IANA delegated .com, but there is no evidence that this delegation was irrevokable, or that the NSF would not agree to making the thing shared without a fight if the IANA had sufficient community backing for the decision. Perry ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 13:25:50 -0700 From: perry@piermont.com Subject: Re: .com Michael Dillon writes: > > Is there any consensus whether .com should be a shared > > domain? > > Consensus is irrelevant. The NSF and NSI own .com. Period. Actually, technically this is untrue. The IANA delegated .com, but there is no evidence that this delegation was irrevokable, or that the NSF would not agree to making the thing shared without a fight if the IANA had sufficient community backing for the decision. Perry ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 14:16:15 -0700 From: Michael Dillon Subject: Re: .com On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Richard J. Sexton wrote: > > > in an organized basis using the dns as a named > > > calulus to facilitate this. > > > > What's a calulus? Why can't you just give away a zillion third level > > domains of vrx.net? > > There are three levels to automation. The ability to manipulate somthing > the abilty to manipulate something by numbr and the ability > to manipulate something bya named calculus - a nameing system. > > There is a Chinese proverb: "The first step in organizing something > is to name it properly". > > The mandate of thr WWW is "The embodiment of human information, > online". As such, thre *name* is important. It has to be easy > to rememeber and easy to type. Wrong. Set up virtual domains for all this info. Then set up a decent WWW server like Apache to serve the virtual domains. Use the following directory structure where VD stands for Virtual Domain: /html--- | /VD1--- | | | index.html | | | /subdir1--- | | | | | robots.txt | | more.html | | andmore.html | | | /VD2--- | | | index.html | | | /subdir1--- | | | | | robots.txt | | more.html Now, each virtual domain has it's own home directory. This directory contains only the index.html document (well, maybe some other stuff like a site map and table of contents). The bulk of the info is stored in subdirectories which are protected by robots.txt so that web crawlers do not index them. This focusses the webcrawlers on the index.html and similar files. Therefore, you do a careful job of crafting that index.html file with keywords and keyphrases to ensure that the site is "named properly" and that it will show up on all searches that are relevant but hopefully it will not turn up as a red herring too often because of extraneous prose. Make sure that you use the first few words of the index.html (which show up on the web search results) carefully to indicate the true nature of the site's contents. Also use the META tags documented at http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=ah&what=web > All information online represents somewhat of an indexing problem. > Alta Vista helps, but at somepoint, there will be so much informaiton > that it won't be *much* help. Two things will happen. One is that people will carefully craft their sites as I described to work with the search engines. The other is that the search engines will develop more sophisticated features especially in their search query languages. > At this point we revert to the DNS. No we revert to Yahoo. > Ideally, you should be able to > type in http://www.subject.com and get information on that subject > whether it's tractors or tomatoes. You get me the capital funding and we'll set up a site that does just that with a URL like http://www.something.com?subject I think we can train people to do that. I think that with $2 million up-front capital we can get this good enough to be useable and attract advertisers. > > Consensus is irrelevant. The NSF and NSI own .com. Period. > > I don't believe thats true. Is this your opinion or > is this a verifiable fact ? There is an RFC which talks a bit about this, but documents from NSI, NSF and FNC all indicate that they believe this to be the case and I don't think it will be easy to change their minds. In particular, check the FNC www pages at www.fnc.gov where you can read the minutes of the FNCAC meetings at which they decided to let NSI cahrge $50 fees. > I was under the opinion that IANA is the guardian of .com, > and frankly I've been a bit disappointed at the way they've been > taking care of it lately. I think IANA is disappointed at the way NSF, FNC and NSI just went ahead and changed things without asking IANA's approval. But that's just my personal opinion. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 14:18:57 -0700 From: Keith Winstein Subject: Re: .com On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Michael Dillon wrote: > Consensus is irrelevant. The NSF and NSI own .com. Period. Not to quibble, but NSF has nothing to do with com. The IANA directly delegates com., net., and org. to the InterNIC. They do, however, delegate edu. to the NSF, who delegates it to the InterNIC. Keith ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 14:23:57 -0700 From: Michael Dillon Subject: Re: .com On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > Michael Dillon writes: > > > Is there any consensus whether .com should be a shared > > > domain? > > > > Consensus is irrelevant. The NSF and NSI own .com. Period. > > Actually, technically this is untrue. The IANA delegated .com, but > there is no evidence that this delegation was irrevokable, or that the > NSF would not agree to making the thing shared without a fight if the > IANA had sufficient community backing for the decision. "Sufficient community backing" is an interesting term. First of all, if IANA creates new iTLD's with sufficient community backing that erodes NSI's and NSF's position because .COM is not as close to a monopoly as it was. At this point, if we have sufficient community backing for a set of protocols and tools which allow TLD sharing and if IANA's new iTLD process has a built in review date regarding shared TLD's that falls just before the expiry of NSF's cooperative agreement, then sufficient community backing may indeed have some influence over the matter. But right now the whole thing is a pig in a poke. Step one: generate some movement, any movement. Step two: steer that movement towards the goal of Shangri-La. Step three: start repairing the potholes and washed-out bridges that we never noticed from way back there. Step four: settle down in an earthly paradise because now we find that Shangri-La doesn't exist and besides, the earthly paradise is actually much nicer than we thought it would be. Step five: imagine what the social anthropologists of the 33rd century will think as they explore the archives of this mailing list in their quest to better understand the origins of human society. Everybody wave to the nice anthropologists :-) Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 17:40:36 -0700 From: Simon Higgs Subject: Re: .com At 12:53 PM -0700 7/31/96, Michael Dillon wrote: >> Is there any consensus whether .com should be a shared >> domain? > >Consensus is irrelevant. The NSF and NSI own .com. Period. > That's a nice fantasy to spread to SAIC shareholders. .COM comes up for re-delegation by IANA at the end of the current NSF contract. At that point other registries may be delegated authority to accept registrations. That was clearly explained by Bill Manning in the IANA conference room at the midday meeting today. For someone who does so much research on this subject I'm a bit dissapointed. _____S_i_m_o_n___H_i_g_g_s______________________H_i_g_g_s___A_m_e_r_i_c_a_____ ... "I'm fine - it's the others" .............. President/CEO ................ _____e-mail: ________________ ______ .... ..... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 17:59:39 -0700 From: perry@piermont.com Subject: Re: .com Simon Higgs writes: > >Consensus is irrelevant. The NSF and NSI own .com. Period. > > That's a nice fantasy to spread to SAIC shareholders. .COM comes up for > re-delegation by IANA at the end of the current NSF contract. At that point > other registries may be delegated authority to accept registrations. That > was clearly explained by Bill Manning in the IANA conference room at the > midday meeting today. This does indeed appear to be the case. Given that, it is not irrelevant for us to discuss the question of whether people generally feel .COM should be run as a shared TLD. Perry ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 18:29:38 -0700 From: Michael Dillon Subject: Re: .com On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Simon Higgs wrote: > At 12:53 PM -0700 7/31/96, Michael Dillon wrote: > > >> Is there any consensus whether .com should be a shared > >> domain? > > > >Consensus is irrelevant. The NSF and NSI own .com. Period. > That's a nice fantasy to spread to SAIC shareholders. .COM comes up for > re-delegation by IANA at the end of the current NSF contract. At that point > other registries may be delegated authority to accept registrations. That > was clearly explained by Bill Manning in the IANA conference room at the > midday meeting today. > > For someone who does so much research on this subject I'm a bit dissapointed. You say that Bill Manning said "may be delegated". I take that to mean that the future is uncertain. Today NSI owns .COM. Yes, this may change once the contract comes up for renewal in 1998, but that is the future, not today. Right now, today, NSI owns .COM. For the near term they will continue to own .COM. Once they cease to own .COM by virtue of the NSF cooperative agreement, the whole question will come up of how the authority for .COM is to be transferred because by that time I am almost certain that there will be instances of registries having sold their domains to other more successful registries. At that time, NSI will argue that it should not be penalized due to grandfathering, i.e. IANA should not just take the domain and hand it to someone else for free. When new iTLD's are created, they are essentially handed over for free similar to pioneer land grants. .COM is not raw unbroken prairie, it is developped urban land and it needs to be handled with that in consideration. I think it is wise of IANA to not try to solve the NSI and .COM problem today but first to see if it is indeed viable to have multiple competing iTLD registries. The problem may solve itself with a mass exodus from .COM. It is also a different class of problem to have an NSI of two years hence with $10 million gross annual income amongst a group of registries with 7 others over $10 million gross annual income. Law is a lot like network protocols. It is easy to say how things should be just as it is easy to say that we should break up data into packets for transmission over a wire. But the devil is in the details as you would know if you read all the technical materials about packet-based network protocols such as X.25, frame relay, TCP/IP and ATM. Layer upon layer upon layer of complexity is revealed yet at any layer it is possible to abstract the prootocls and describe them in simple terms. Same thing with making policy or making law. Grand plans do not work. You cannot solve all problems in one fell swoop. It takes time, study, experimentation and hard work to develop working policies just as it takes all those same things to create working protocols. In any single message to this list all of us must focus on simple abtractions that we hope accurately describe a portion of the problem in a way that leads to better understanding and to a better design for our policies. But it is as much a mistake to assume any one person has *THE* solution to the entire problem as it is to assume that any one person is totally clueless and has nothing to contribute. We are all mere mortals here. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 18:56:38 -0700 From: Michael Dillon Subject: Re: .com On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > Given that, it is not irrelevant for us to discuss the question of > whether people generally feel .COM should be run as a shared TLD. Opinions, eh? I think all TLD's should *EVENTUALLY* be run as shared TLD's. I'd like to see that possibility recognized in any IANA RFC in that they extend ownership for only a limited time, no more than two years, and that any new registries go in with their eyes open knowing that they *MUST* share the TLD's after their term of exclusive use. Ideally the term of exclusive use would end the same day as the NSF/NSI coop agreement as a subtle hint. Of course all the hoopla that happens as the registries shift to shared TLD's will make it very hard for NSF or NSI or anyone to continue .COM as anything but a shared TLD at that time. And the fact of the matter is that we have NO protocols and NO running code to handle shared registries today. So if anyone here *SERIOUSLY* wants to see shared TLD's then the first thing to do is to write a charter for a WG to design those protocols and get it accepted by the IETF. It may, in fact, be able to fit into another existing WG so maybe the first thing is to review existing WG descriptions. Note that this is not just an international TLD thing, but that there may well be national ISO 3166 NIC's that would like to have agents dealing with all the customer relations side of registering domains and thus they could use all the same technology. In fact, France and the UK already are moving in this direction to some extent so make sure to get comments on a possible WG charter from people at RIPE and APNIC. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 19:11:12 -0700 From: perry@piermont.com Subject: Re: .com Kent Crispin writes: > Personally, giving Eugene and Karl a shot at .COM is preferable > to a hasty burst of new TLDs. Hey, if Karl and Eugene want to run a registry under .COM and .COM is run shared, hell, why not? Perry ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 19:15:48 -0700 From: perry@piermont.com Subject: Re: .com Michael Dillon writes: > And the fact of the matter is that we have NO protocols and NO running > code to handle shared registries today. True enough, but neither is a serious challenge. Transaction systems are bothersome to write but are very well understood. > So if anyone here *SERIOUSLY* wants to see shared TLD's then the > first thing to do is to write a charter for a WG to design those > protocols and get it accepted by the IETF. I believe that this is what we are doing here. Perry ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 19:55:06 -0700 From: Dan Busarow Subject: Re: .com On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > "Richard J. Sexton" writes: > > Is there any consensus whether .com should be a shared > > domain? > > I definitely think it can and should be. Absolutely, as soon as the current agreement expires it should be opened up. Dan - -- Dan Busarow 714 443 4172 DPC Systems dan@dpcsys.com Dana Point, California 83 09 EF 59 E0 11 89 B4 8D 09 DB FD E1 DD 0C 82 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 22:55:39 -0700 From: Michael Dillon Subject: Re: .com On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > > Michael Dillon writes: > > And the fact of the matter is that we have NO protocols and NO running > > code to handle shared registries today. > > True enough, but neither is a serious challenge. Transaction systems > are bothersome to write but are very well understood. Agreed. It is more a matter of getting the requirements specified, and getting the details agreed upon. > > So if anyone here *SERIOUSLY* wants to see shared TLD's then the > > first thing to do is to write a charter for a WG to design those > > protocols and get it accepted by the IETF. > > I believe that this is what we are doing here. So far I haven't seen a whole bunch of discussion about the text of a charter or the timeline. You interested in doing that? Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Jul 1996 23:54:08 -0700 From: Simon Higgs Subject: Re: .com At 10:50 PM -0700 7/31/96, Michael Dillon wrote: >So far I haven't seen a whole bunch of discussion about the text of a >charter or the timeline. You interested in doing that? > I posted the start of the charter thread on Monday with "CHARTER" in the subject line in big ol' capital letters. Do I need to repost it? _____S_i_m_o_n___H_i_g_g_s______________________H_i_g_g_s___A_m_e_r_i_c_a_____ ... "I'm fine - it's the others" .............. President/CEO ................ _____e-mail: ________________ ______ .... .....