On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 03:51:16PM +1200, Ewen McNeill wrote:

In message <20020827030232.GT83446(a)buffoon.automagic.org>, Joe Abley writes:

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On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 12:04:10PM +1200, Roger De Salis wrote:

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It is very hard to see how a 2LD can be justified to support the wishes of the 5 real banks, and ~20 wannabe banks, or broking houses, or insurance houses, who like to think they are bank like.

It's harder for me to figure out why anybody needs to be put in the position of having to justify it. [no technical reason, etc]

IMHO the reason for requiring a justification for creating 2lds is to ensure that they are created with some thought as to how they will be sub delegated, so that you can actually _have_ national.bank.nz, et al, rather than just having one organisation getting "bank.nz" and everyone else needing to get other variations (national-bank.nz, asb-bank.nz, whatever).

Nobody gave any thought to how domains under neos.co.nz might be delegated before they agreed to delegate the name to you. I don't really see why bank.nz should be any different.

The alternative that some are suggesting (a free for all in the second level domain space) would basically ensure that the same "land grab" that happened in .com happens in .nz; and ensure that we have to have dozens of variations on $foo-movie $foo-the-movie movie-$foo (etc) to work around the collapsed namespace. ("national" being an obvious example.)

I'm not sure that domain fever is still at the pitch it was a few years ago. Certainly a couple of the new gTLD registry operators seem to be disappointed that it isn't. There are ways of handling land-grabs. People have done it before.

As I said earlier today, I've yet to hear a compelling argument that $foo-the-movie.nz (and variations thereupon) is somehow better than $foo.movie.nz

Why do you need one?

If we collapse the namespace so that it becomes "whatever you can get" under .nz, then we might as well give up any pretense that they're "obvious" and hand them out like ASNs. At least there'd be less call for "special" names -- once 42 and a few others had been handed out.

That's a strange comparison. ASNs are a mucher scarcer resource than names, they're much more expensive and difficult to get hold of, and you get whatever number the RIR decides to give you, regardless of preference.

And then someone could build a directory service over the top of that offering a one-to-many mapping.

We could turn one largely flat namespace into another largely flat namespace, and *never have to hear about delegation of bank.nz again*. Imagine that :) Joe - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

On Tue, 27 Aug 2002, Ewen McNeill wrote:

And then someone could build a directory service over the top of that offering a one-to-many mapping.

And as Chris pointed out that's (almost) already been done by Google (or whoever you deem to be search engine of the moment). Now if we had a flat domain structure that made *no* claim to being some sort of directory then we could be having the debate about how to have a sensible directory with search facilities which only returned NZ results funded from the domain name fee. Now that would be a useful topic for this group to think about instead of agonizing over which second level domains would give a meaningful structure. Imagine this debate being held over 0800 numbers: Oh dear, we can't get 0800 454 672 (0800 4LIONRA), we can't possibly continue with our business plan, people simply won't know how to ring us or be sure that they're talking to Lionra. Let's ask the phone companies to create a new number space 0801 (and 0802) so that we can have 0801 454 672 and only allow our pals in the space. That's not how banks, travel agents, plumbers, charities etc work. If they get a good 0800 number they use it (although I suspect it's more promote by telco marketing people than it's really worth) and if they don't they don't. Whatever happens they need to tell people what their number is, they need to have in business cards, adverts.... And the other thing they do is get themselves listed in Yellow Pages, a directory service. Any parallels here with the net? If I wanted someone to find my business on the net, I'd be much more interested in getting a high listing on Google etc that having a cutesy domain name. <TANGENT> Interesting to note that the BANK category of Yellow Pages contains Pacific Home Loans and Thomas Cook - entities that at first pass seem to fail the criteria for 'bank.nz' and look the sky hasn't fallen in. Also nice to note the categories before and after BANKS: Balloons-Hot Air and Banners. There's some food for thought in the Yellow Pages categories. Expect domains like: acupuncturists.nz acupuncturists-members-of-the-nz-register-of.nz corsetry.nz ham-and-bacon-curers.nz galvanizing.nz shelters-geodesic-or-inflatable.nz And the justification would be the same as that of the banks. And of course 'celts.nz' can use many of the arguments put forward by 'maori.nz'. </TANGENT> - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog