Seems like TLD policies would make a nice research paper for someone. 
There ought to be enough international experience to do some
quantitative work, tabulating on the important factors: naming policy,
payment policy, whether there are limits per organisation, the size of
the domain, the amount of "hoarding" etc.  For example,

	naming		payment			numerical limit
	policy		policy			policy
	======		======			====
.com	FCFS		use now, pay later	none
.co.uk	FCFS		pay before use		none
.com.au	link to org	pay before use		some

With respect to hoarding, my gut feel is that the numerical limit (only
allocating one or a few names to an organisation discouraging hoarding)
is the most important, followed by the payment policy ("use now, pay
later" encouraging hoarding) and the naming policy last.  Still, I might
be wrong - it'd be interesting to know whether there's a perceived
problem with hoarding in .co.uk.

There are plenty of factors in a policy mix too:
- expense to administer
- suitability for competitive DNA framework
- propensity for hoarding.

I found it interesting that until recently, japan had a policy of
uniqueness at the third level, ie. fred.co.jp excluded fred.ac.jp.

In response to an earlier question:
> How many domain names can one entity have 'reasonable' claim to?
> 
It's clear that an entity can have as many domain names as it likes,
obtained from .com or some other TLD or a private SLD or whatever.  So
to restate that question: "how many names should be allocated to an
organisation from within .au SLDs"

The consensus around .com.au seems to be "one or a few".

Getting back to mappings, if DNAs stated that they'd only issue names
that are similar or identical to existing trademarks to their respective
trademark owners, even within a proposed .tm.au, it'd be easy to make
mistakes and have differences of opinion.  That's where I would see a
risk.  and I reckon that'd be true more or less true of any DNA policy
that asserted a (useful) mapping from an external citation authority
(not just trademarks) to the DNS.  It's arguable whether something like
ACNs or the .plc.uk policy is useful.

Note that the .com.au policy is FCFS in the end: Fred's Fish Shop Pty
Ltd and Frank's Fine Sausages Pty Ltd can't both have ffs.com.au. 
Whether all the other stuff has any value or not I can't tell. 
Melbourne IT usually defend it by saying "we inherited it from someone
else".

Leni.

David Keegel wrote:
> 
> Geoff Huston wrote:
> ] NSI's "use now, pay later" policy encourages speculative hoarding.
> 
> (Sometimes I wonder whether NSI are deliberately trying to shoot
> themselves in the foot.)
> 
> ] Which is why I still believe that a FCFS policy, tempered by some
> ] judicious policy may well be appropriate.
> 
> I think past NSI experience with COM has shown that a pure FCFS policy
> is not a good one (except for the lawyers).  On the other hand, I would
> not advocate changing com.au policy to something as strict as plc.uk
> where you can virtually only register your exact company name.
> 
> In some ways, I would say the current policy for com.au is "a FCFS
> policy, tempered by some judicious policy".  In this case, the
> "judicious policy" is requiring domain names to reflect in some
> way an organisational or business name.
> 
> It does not seek to enforce uniqueness in the same way as plc.uk,
> nor does it allow the "open slather" approach which prevails in com.
> Because it does not seek to enforce uniqueness, there is no need
> for suggestions like rbn.vic.com.au.
> 
> This means that there can still be cases where two organisations
> have a dispute over a name which they are both "entitled" to.
> But if you can reduce the number of disputes so that domain
> hoarders are (mostly) out in the cold, then this is surely a
> good thing.
> 
> I do not see an advantage in weakening this aspect of com.au policy.
> 
> In fact, I suggest that if any new 2LDs were created for commericial
> organisations at some stage in future (for whatever reason), that
> this aspect be written in to their policies as well.
> 
> ] >Geoff Huston wrote:
> ] >> I must admit that after much thought about this I wonder about the
> ] >> wisdom of using an external citation as the reference of 'validity'
> ] >> of a DNS name.
> 
> ] At 11:53 AM 7/11/97 +1000, Leni Mayo wrote:
> ] >A stated intent on a DNAs part to implement a mapping between the DNS
> ] >and an external citation authority might have a bit of legal risk too.
> 
> Leni, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "a mapping" (like plc.uk?).
> Or the specific legal risks you see with that.  Could you clarify?
> __________________________________________________________________________
> David Keegel <djk&#167;cyber.com.au>  http://www.cyber.com.au/  +61 3 9642-5997
> Cybersource P/L: Unix Systems Administration and TCP/IP network management