The fewer 2LDs and the more generic they are, the more conflicts arise 
and the greater they become in value, leading to more untoward 
activities such as domain speculation and cyber-squatting. This is what 
has happened with .com - just look at the number of UDRP disputes and 
the dollar values being placed on such domains in the secondary market.

Such activities diminish greatly as you move away from .com to other 
extensions such as .biz, .info, etc. and hardly occurs at all in the 
industry specific domains such as .aero, .museum, etc.

While the original purpose of the DNS was to provide a static, human 
friendly reference point to an IP address, it has since gone well beyond 
this simple addressing purpose to one of branding, marketing and 
intellectual property. Try telling a room of marketing executives and IP 
lawyers that the DNS is not a directory service, they'll think your the 
comedian doing the warm up before the real speaker begins - of course 
people expect to find Microsoft at microsoft.com and CocaCola at coke.com.

People have come to expect that when they type in xyz.com or xyz.com.au 
that it is the official website of XYZ, they don't expect it to be a 
.net, .org etc. The .com / .com.au extension has lost its original 
meaning and has taken on a generic meaning of "the official website", so 
much so that people even expect the official website of charities to end 
in a .com / .com.au not .org / .org.au.

Although this started as a perception issue with the public, it has 
gained real substance as domain dispute decisions re-enforce the fact 
that .com / .com.au should be the official website.

auDA inherited a flawed namespace, largely derived on the ICANN model. 
If auDA does not address these flaws they will become increasingly 
irrelevant and it will be the dispute proceedings, courtrooms and the IP 
lawyers who decide the eligibility and allocation of domain names.

The current model is not future-proof and it will lead to an ever 
increasing number of conflicts and issues such as domain speculation. 
This needs to be addressed.

We don't need thousands of 2LDs but it does make sense to introduce many 
more, especially for larger and more important industries such as banks, 
TV, radio, etc. The more 2LDs and the more specific they are the more 
open the namespace is, with fewer conflicts and less domain speculation.


Doug Robb wrote:
>
> There has been some good follow up on this post below but as someone 
> who has dealt with categorization of information for many years let me 
> tell you it is not easy to develop even a mildly decent scheme when 
> the number of categories become large and the information being 
> organized is quite disparate -- and more importantly you discover you 
> need to put the same entity in more than one category (often this is 
> thrust upon you because the entities activities span multiple categories).
>
>  
>
> Just try and look up something a bit unusual in the yellow pages to 
> see what I mean. So for my two cents worth you want a minimal number 
> of 2LD's and given the problems raised already it's too late to 
> consider direct registration of .au domain especially given the 
> likelihood people will try and create precisely the structure below 
> but without any hope of a coherent, consistent approach - and thus 
> rendering the namespace a logical mess -- not one thing or another.
>
>  
>
> However not all is lost because even if this did happen -- my final 
> point -- and it was made in the first discussion we ever had on this 
> list is that the DNS is not a directory service. Now go to your 
> nearest window, open it and shout to the world "The DNS is not a 
> directory service!"
>
>  
>
> The purpose of a domain name is simply to provide a static, human 
> friendly reference point to an IP address which can be found by the 
> DNS system. The whole notion that domain names should somehow be 
> organized as some sort of on-line equivalent of the yellow pages has 
> always stuck me as quite misguided.  
>
>  
>
> Yes we all want a catchy, easy to remember 'top of mind' name (like 
> dare I say clarity.com.au) but this not the same as trying to organize 
> everything around you into some sort of category based structured 
> directory -- with all the failings previously mentioned.
>
>  
>
> If you think about it your domain name could be random numbers or 
> characters and the job of finding you -- and everything one would 
> possibly want to know about you - would be much better done by a real 
> directory service. The next Google .....
>
>
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