>Somebody please kick me for re-entering this debate.

 ditto.

>The bottleneck now is availability of "good" names (i.e. all the good-fit
>names have been taken, and what's left are poor-fit names).


>I'd like to know how this value and utility thing is measured.  IMHO a
>situation in which there are bottlenecks is an indicator of low value.

on the other hand a restricted name space is the only one which permits
branding to operate. If I want to create consumer-level branding of
some product I need to ensure that the name I pick displaces any other
use of the same name, as I am about to invest a large sume of
publicity money into that particular name. A name space which does
not possess displacement attributes is of much lesser value.


>Geoff's paper goes on to mention a proliferation of SLDs reducing utility
>of the DNS due to "xyz.X.au" existing potentially for many values of X.
>As Geoff well knows the DNS is not designed to be a directory of content


but what the DNS designers thought, and what you and I think is irrelevant.

My point is that the Internet punter has this view, and thats the view
that counts in the end. To the mass market world out there the DNS
name = a directory lookup. You may not like it, but thats what drives
a lot of this DNS discussion into ever decreasing tiny circles.


>Users need external tools (i.e. search engines) to find the location
>of content and/or organisations and this practice is well-established.


rofl - search engines where the search outcomes are for sale? very
useful systems indeed.



>Indeed.  IMHO the problem at hand is not name functionality but name
>availability.  Names should necessarily be less functional because on
>the Internet they must be unique and there are N billion people on the
>planet who might want a domain name.

What you think 'should' happen and what is going on on the other
side of your door to the rest of the world are at some divergence.

Now while stating goals in terms of "we should go here or there" is a fine
thing to do, you need to recognise that in stating such an objective
the world is located somehere else, with a default set of expectations
and behaviors which are different from your "shoulds".

>I'd sympathise, except that there's no common understanding of the issues
>and the thrust of my article here is that the problem now is essentially
>different from the situation we had in 1996.

And I would contend that the entire issue about names is far far older
than the Internet, and nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed
_fundmentally_. Our previous solutions to name clashes is to invent
a new namespace in a new environment. When a tool like the Internet
compresses the unique nature of each environment into a grey bland
flat plain, any attempt to create a new namespace in a new environment
is so artifical that the end customer won't buy it.



>*ouch* Somebody kicked me! That'll teach me for getting involved in DNS
>muckraking again.

true.

bye.

g