Simon Hackett wrote:

] >Ok, so what happened to ADNA considering the creation of ".biz.au", which
] >Michael Malone and I co-proposed multiple times, beginning prior to the
] >formal creation of ADNA?

Mark Hughes wrote:
] There is no substantial difference that I am aware of between the
] proposal for .biz.au and the one for .pr.au.  OK, the characters are
] different.  If you thing .biz. is a huge improvement on .pr,
] say so.  I don't think the actual characters are that important.

The actual characters are irrelevant, except as a summary of the
policy for the 2LD.

Some things I liked about that biz.au proposal:

(1) It was made by two players who have more than 5* years experience
    each in the Australian Internet scene, whom the most of industry know.

    (*) to pick an arbitrary number; they probably have _much_ more
    than 5 years experience.

(2) The proposed registrars have demonstrated technical competency
    with issues like DNS, as well as business issues like running an
    ISP, over a long period.

(3) There was a well-thought out disaster recovery plan included with
    the proposal in case either registrar went broke or lost interest.

(4) The SRS software would be developed/obtained at no cost to ADNA
    and would become usable by ADNA for other 2LDs with no strings.

Some things I didn't like about the biz.au proposal:

(1) What happens if the "trial" of a shared domain is a success?
    Presumably we would want to generalise it to com.au (the main game)
    and net.au and let iinet and Internode be registrars for them too.
    At which point, what is the purpose of biz.au?

(2) How are people supposed to choose between com.au and biz.au?
    Historically, the .au name space has been organised so that the
    purposes of 2LDs have been mostly orthogonal (mutually exclusive),
    with the possible exception of net.au.

    I'm not sure I like the long term consequences of asking registrant
    organisations to chose a domain name (for long term use) based on
    short term differences in pricing, service or number of registrars.

(3) It didn't specify whether other registrars could also service the
    biz.au domain over time.  If it were just a limited test, that would
    not be such a big deal -- it could instead be something to work out
    before generalising com.au (the main game).

] ADNA voted against that.  ADNA should certainly get a
] 'public trust' tick of approval for its decision not
] to approve trademark names for products in .com.au.
 
] Well, how about it folks - credit where credit is due, eh?

I welcome ADNA's decision not to change the rules for com.au
to allow trademark names and/or product names to be sufficient
for granting a com.au name to an organisation.

But `public trust' is not just about make one or two or three
decisions in the public interest, its about ensuring ALL the
decisions are (will be) made in the public interest.

__________________________________________________________________________
 David Keegel <djk&#167;cyber.com.au>  URL: http://www.cyber.com.au/users/djk/
Cybersource P/L: Unix Systems Administration and TCP/IP network management