On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, Dassa wrote:

 > |> -----Original Message-----
 > |> From: Jon Lawrence [mailto:jon§jonlawrence.com] 
[..]
 > |> so who gets magpies.footy.au?

Sounds silly, but in fact this question typifies the whole madness that
new 2LDs in .au would promulgate, especially amongst those again pushing
for such 'open slather' 2LDs, who appear not to have read the prior
discussions and conclusions on this over the years at all.

 > |> I tend to agree with you that creating new 2LDs adds very little
 > value to
 > |> the .au domain space.  Lets give id.au a go and see how it
 > fares...much
 > |> the same as the recently released me.uk I suspect (ie noone wants
 > them).

I agree with Jon and several other people who've said something similar.

 > <SNIP>
 > 
 > I disagree.  There is a need for some additional 2LD's.

What evidence supports this claim?

 > Not to put
 > anything against id.au, I think having some geographical names under
 > (state).au at a fixed cost would be beneficial and meet some consumer
 > demand.

Where is any such consumer demand illustrated?  (apart from proponents)

 > What I don't want to see is hostnames under such 2LD's costing
 > the same sort of price as *.com.au hostnames.  I would like to see a
 > reasonable price charged for (city).(state).au and a fixed price of say
 > $5AUD a year on any sub-domains under them as a condition of registration.

More to the point, who gets to 'own' some city/town/village under this
proposal?  How will they then decide who may 'licence' subdomains, and
under what criteria?  (Hint: all this has been covered by prior panels)

Since these would not be commercial operations (covered by com.au or
perhaps .net.au), nor associations and clubs (.asn.au), nor other
non-profits (.org.au), nor individuals (.id.au, especially in its
recently expanded form), who and what exactly would they be to serve?

There appears to be no way that AuDA is going to demand less than $11 as
its slice of any domain names registered in Australia henceforth, as
this is as close as the previously free .org.au domains come.

 > The (city) level should have strict criteria for the body
 > acting as the registry on the 3LD.  For instance the body should offer
 > registrations in a particular format that would be consistant across all
 > the 3LD's and at a set price.

The only bodies that could get district.state.au would be local councils
and the like.  Are these appropriate bodies to become domain allocators,
or perhaps salespeople, within their stated brief?  I don't think so.

 > Will most likely expand on this in a submission to AuDA.

I guess you'll have researched existing such proposals such as the 'one
city one site' (as if!) proposal already hoping to centralise control of
communities' resources under government bureaucracies.  It's a crock.

 > As for other 2LD's, given the use of com.au etc, if the geographical
 > names were introduced, there may not be any need to expand in other
 > directions for some time.

There is no demonstrated need for more .au 2LDs now.  The .com.au space
remains close enough to infinite for practical purposes already, and
there's an equal amount of 'spare space' in every other 2L domain.

This whole exercise can only benefit those trying to sell more domains.
People will register domains as needed.  With more 2LDs such as .biz.au
we'll see the d-pushers trying to frighten people into registering a
.biz.au for every .com.au or .net.au "before somebody else does"; it's
purely a scam to let a few mates make more virtually unearned money, and
apart from big companies to whom it's pennies, increased consumer costs.

And why would AuDA be pushing such a proposal?  Well, there's that $11
per domain fee, so AuDA has a vested interest in growing, not just
managing, the .au namespace.  And perhaps there'll be more auction$ ..

My bet is that the panel will be predominantly filled by people already
of the view that we "need" more 2LDs, at least half of which will stand
to gain financially by their implementation.  As usual, the 'public
participation' will be a sham, and views contrary to the predetermined
outcome will be politely but firmly ignored anyway.

Bah, humbug!

Cheers, Ian