>  | neither do I think implementing any new domains under .au prior to
>  | competition can be seen as anything but self serving
>
>I'm not sure what the relevance is - if more sub-domains of .AU are
>created before sharing is implemented, it is unlikely it would be MelbIT
>who is running them...   After competition works is another matter.

Robert, I guess I have to ask: Wh owill run them?  ISP's?  NON ISP's?

>as to favour another, but how to deal with cases where two registries want
>to install conflicting information about the same domain name.

Oh for goodness sake.  This is the late 90's.  We can measure the speed of
two runners or swimmers to the hundreths of a second, or even those "cool
dudes" who pile into those bob sleds and  travel at 136.97 km/h down a snow
duct.

And your seriously telling me the problem is with two registies sending
conflicting information.

I hope you don't travel by Plane very often.

Hotels must have it really hard all the time.

>that you mean are the rules of the domain, and those, absolutely without
>question, must be applied equally by all registries.   It would make no sense
>for one registry to have qualification criteria (or whatever) that another
>did not.

This is something I totally agree with.  In fact I think 90% of people do.

>domains of any random name to anyone who asked - it does them no good at
>all to refuse requests.

This is certainly a true statement.

>The com.au rules were in place before MelbIT

Most were.

>took over (though they have been slightly modified) and will remain more or

Better.

>less unchanged when there is competition.

Probably.

>The rules are to protect the DNS itself, and to make sure it remains a
>relatively sane place in which to name organisations into the far future.

Hmmm, I've heard this before. The rules were there to protect the DNS in a
time where it wasn't commercial as such.  Now it's commercial the rules
tend to cause a few problems.  Education would be a nice idea.  Many ISP's
need it really bad.

>Note also that the DNS provides the rough equivalent of the phone "white 
>pages".

Robert, DNS is not a Directory Service. It's a way to convert hard to
remember IP Numbers to names that hopefully a person can remember.  It
wasn't designed for Commercial use, it was designed for common use.  Please
don't encourage the comparison, it only causes people to argue more for
"dinctionary" words and "single" words from the business name.

>That is, assuming you know the name (exactly) you can find the

Well, that's not so much an issue any more.  Webfinder and DomainFinderfix
both those problems.  Yu don't even have to be CLOSE to get a match.

>other information needed to make contact.   The DNS was absolutely not
>designed as a "yellow pages" type directory - it doesn't have anything like
>the right properties - ie: its intent is NOT to allow people to find things
>where they don't know exactly what they're looking for.

Which is a contradiction to your comments about the White Pages. Whites
Pages you NEED TO KNOW exactly what you are looking for.  The Yellow Pages
you only need to know the category.  ie COM  NET or ORG in our simple of
examples.


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