On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Rowe, Joshua wrote:

> from: http://www.auda.org.au/policy/panel-name-2000/submissions/ipsen2.html
> 
> "This proposal has been presented to Australia Post. While recognising that
> the proposal has merits and complements Post's existing physical addressing
> capabilities, Post management cannot give a firm commitment to endorsing the
> proposal at this time. However, Post is prepared to support the proposal


The proposal seems to be me to be trying to solve a problem
that simple doesn't exist and the proposal is full of
totally unsubstanciated statements such as:


"It is a worlds best practice solution for creation,
equitable use and responsible management of the geographic
component of the .au namespace. "

Thats a big statement, how so? I don't see anything to
suggest this is the case.

"It provides an intuitive and commercially independent email
addressing component that would enable all Australians to
have a logical and portable email address regardless of
their work status or ISP."

Portable email address? How is me§town.state.country
portable? You shift town and you change address right? 
If you need a permanent email address thats not hard to
organise now.

And as for 'commercially independent email addressing
component' why is this of any concern one way or the
other? And who is going to run and manage the resources
in the namespace anyway - commercial operaters with 
probably email forwarding to ISP accounts.

Under 

"What is the need? "

"An Intuitive system for finding something in a known
geographic location within Australia "

This is nonsense. Drilling down town.state.country to find
"something" in a name space is not to understand the
difference between domain names and a directories of
various sorts. A single domain name is simply insufficient
information to imply any particular service or resource.

And since every town.state.au site will be a disjoint
collection of pointers to other sites or resources etc
it will not server this purpose at all. I bet the only
common link they'll all have is a pointer back to Telstra's
white and yellow pages. You get to a site and still not
find what you are looking for.



"A common system of email addressing within Australia"

Again a solution to a 'problem' that doesn't exist! We all
have and need work, club and association  email address's
for instance. There is nothing instrinsically useful about
me§town.state.au except that it implies where you live in
a domain name - what a massive overhead to convey this one
piece of information!

"A structured system of web addressing that matches the
email system "

See above.


"A personally portable email system"

"An accountable system of addressing to cover the needs of
law enforcement agencies and legislative bodies"

This is out of left field! Who needs this, how would it
work? If this was part of the deal why would anyone want one
of these domains?

"A fully participative email and web addressing system,"

and so on. I could go on - Australia Post say more work
and I'd just say forget about it in its current form.

Domain names are not the way to achieve functionality as
broad and ill defined as in the current proposal.



regards doug




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Doug Robb
Clarity Software Pty Ltd      http://clarity.com.au
GPO Box 763                   Phone: 0403 02 2527
Nedlands 6909                 Fax:   (618) 93867564
Australia                     email: doug§clarity.com.au
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