Re: toward domain names in the public interest

Hello Dan,

I'm rather sceptical about the signatories system,
in particular about the renewal after five years.
Ideally, our technology including uris should
become invisible to end users. Imagine that
in 5 or 50 years, there is a lot of software
around that relies on some namespaces at www.w3.org,
but this is mostly unknown, because it 'just works'.
How do you make sure that at the time needed, you
can drum up enough people? Everybody would be
affected if the domain name went out of service,
but nobody cares enough to worry to send in their
vote.

Also, assume that in 50 years, only 999 people
depended on www.w3.org, but it was really important
for them. Why should the domain go out of service?

For at least some things, we need a system that
is more stable with less administrative overhead
than your proposal.

With example.com/org/..., the ietf has shown that
they can reserve some domain names permanently for
a specific purpose. There is no reason they couldn't
do that for other domain names and other purposes.

The problem with www.iana.org seems to be that people
see in it both the organization as well as the function.
The best thing would be to make clear that iana.org is
used for the function, and give whoever currently carries
out this function another name (if they don't already have
one), and then to make sure iana.org is reserved by the
ietf for protocol purposes.

Regards,   Martin.

At 17:58 01/09/25 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:

>Thinking out loud... try this policy:
>
>If you can get 1000 signatories (and no credible
>complaint is lodged with WIPO over a 6 month period,
>say), you can get ICANN to permanently reserve your domain name
>for your use. You have to get another 1000 signatories
>every 5 years to keep it. If you ever fail to get enough
>signatories to keep it, it is permanently retired.
>
>There are all sorts of details... who is "you" after
>all? I think we could ground the authentication
>in surface-mail-callback, ala ISOC voting.
>
>Anyway... the details seem workable, and the value
>of having permanent domain names in the public
>interest seems worthwhile.
>
>
>--
>Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Wednesday, 26 September 2001 01:51:26 UTC