At 11:14 +1100 24/11/00, Patrick Corliss wrote:

>I think there would have to be a awful lot of 2LDs before the general public
>got seriously confused.

My point is that users are already seriously confused. They have to 
contend with com, net, org, com.au, au.com, net.au, org.au, asn.au, 
as well as any number of CC-TLDs.

My occasional role as ISP help desk operator has given me exposure to 
users who are horribly confused about all this, to the extent that 
they are unable to reliably send email to anywhere except hotmail.com.

Introducing a whole lot of new domains will only make matters worse.


>As far as not coping, it's happening anyway in the gTLD space.  So even
>without new 2TLDs in Australia, they're going to see a lot of that stuff.

Indeed. This is something I personally am not looking forward to. I 
think there's one statement Vic has been making that will probably 
come to pass... the DNS will be replaced by some other protocol. The 
reason will be that the DNS as we know it is self-destructing under 
the weight of exploitation and mismanagement.


>You cynical person :).  I was think of at least part going to fund auDA.
>But from a public interest viewpoint, (2) might be better than (1).

At the risk of inflaming ggm even further, I'll just say quickly that 
if it comes to pass that option 2 is adopted, I'll be on the next 
plane to the US or Ireland or somewhere that views IT as a valuable 
industry rather than something to be suppressed by legislation.

  ...R.