Let me don my non-cynical hat and put forward a scenario - take bank.au as
an example, as it's been suggested as a legitimate candidate.
 
I can think of a mere handful of bank.au domains - anz, cba, commonwealth,
qld, westpac, boq, queensland, suncorp, bendigo, city, citi and so on.  Then
come the grey areas over which disputes would inevitably arise from each of
the competing "legitimate" registrants:  lending.bank.au, finance.bank.au,
cheap.bank.au, friendly.bank.au, local.bank.au, regional.bank.au,
credit.bank.au, community.bank.au, farmers.bank.au, your.bank.au,
online.bank.au, internet.bank.au and a whole lot of others.
 
Yeah, right.  There's no consumer confusion between whichbank.com.au,
which.bank.au and whichbank.au.  Phisherman's Paradise.
 
But wait ... there's more!  I do newsletters for a certain bank as part of
my business.  I then qualify to register newsletter.bank.au, because there's
already a close or substantial connection.  I also resell domain names
therefore I qualify for domains.bank.au.  Oh - websites, too, which gives me
websites.bank.au and sites.bank.au.  I have an overdraft - therefore I could
well qualify for borrower.bank.au and lender.bank.au because I have a
savings account as well.  I know my bank thinks there's a close and
substantial connection there.
 
What problems, exactly, would the additional 2LDs resolve?
 
Move onto plumbers - you have the same competition (and potential for
conflict) with multiple joes.plumbing.au as you would have with
joesplumbing.com.au.  Or are proponents of this idea thinking that
joesplumbing.plumbing.com.au would somehow resolve the issue?
 
Extrapolate the argument a little further, and just about any business could
claim a close or substantial connection to just about any 2LD should they so
desire.  How then could this be policed?  Managed?  Controlled?
Administered?  What policies would need to be instituted that are different
to those already in place?  Would existing policies even function properly?
 
My point is this - in my view contriving additional 2LDs would appear to
replicate and exacerbate the very problems its advocates maintain it would
resolve.  As far as I can see, unless persuaded otherwise, the only
beneficiaries would be registrars, the registry, domain monetisers and
inevitably some lawyers.
 
Ron Stark


  _____  

From: dns-bounces+ronstark=snapsite.com.au§dotau.org
[mailto:dns-bounces+ronstark=snapsite.com.au§dotau.org] On Behalf Of
info§enigmaticminds.com.au
Sent: Saturday, 30 June 2007 13:37
To: .au DNS Discussion List
Subject: Re: [DNS] Australia registers more .au than .com domains


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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