RE: [Membership] Structure of 'at large' membership

[a@help.org]

Your argument is vague.  This type of reaction comes from a gut feeling
rather than any factual or legal argument.  What about people who speculate
and buy gold, silver, land, Furby's, etc.  Why is the domain situation any
different?  Why do you think the Post Office puts out all kinds of different
stamps ... so people will buy them for speculation/collecting.  There are
also places like the Franklin Mint or small countries that print all these
Elvis stamps.  Their entire business is based on this type of speculation.

I admit I have been mad when I see a domain I wanted for sale by a domain
broker.  I also never planned on selling any domains until I started looking
at the system and I saw how easy it was to get 'good' domain names.  There
are only about 5 people buying a vast majority of the good domains that
become available from 'on hold' now.  If I don't get it one of these other
people will.  I would be nuts not to grab them.  Good or bad in any specific
situation, this is how the free market works.

As a practical matter I also do not see how there could be any such rules
anyway.  I could buy a domain just to resell or, as most of my domains, I
put up web sites related to the domain.  What if I decide to sell my web
site/business including the domain name?  Do you think ICANN would, or
should, try to stop this?  How would ICANN even know if a domain was sold or
simply transferred?  As was stated before, who would police it?  I don't
think it would be possible to set up any such rules.  For example, AOL just
'bought' Netscape, should they have to give back Netscape.com to Internic?

What I think should be done now is to provide a fair method of getting
domains when they are released from hold.  the vast majority of domains that
would be bought for speculation are already registered.  At this point in
time the 'good' domains that become available are released from hold.  I
think this will change within the next year or two as people realize the
value of the 'good' names.  I also expect the majority of transfers, at
least for desirable names, in the future will be domain sales from one party
to another rather than registration via Internic or whomever is registering
domains in the future.

Russ Smith
http://consumer.net


 >HOwever, I am deadly against
>profiteering and speculation in domain names as it is distruptive ,
>harmful and non productive for any business.  Thus as long as we have
>rules that disallow any sales of domain names