Re: Competition; was Re: [Membership] ICANN: The Issue of Membership---

[Greg Skinner <gds@best.com>]

Michael Sondow <msondow@iciiu.org> wrote:

>Moving intellectual content isn't practical. Many, maybe most,
>websites are made by third paries for the client whose website it
>is. The website owner doesn't know how to move the website from one
>server to another, whereas he or she can easily do it when it's
>associated with a domain name, which is what is moved. You know
>this. Why are you pretending it isn't so? To make a point, you
>distort the truth? How can we have a serious discussion if you do 
>that?

I would like to suggest that this is a matter of opinion and possibly
an area where policy needs to be specified.

>> There really is no such thing (in current technology) as "your own
>> domain name" unless you are the registry. [...]

>Yes I am. If I'm the admin contact for a domain name registered with
>InterNIC, I can change the nameservers whenever I want. No approval of the
>hosting server administartor is necessary, as is correct. Are you proposing
>that the tech contact for domain names have more authority over them than
>the person who's paying for them? You may wish that were the case, but I'm
>happy to say you will never get it passed.

Perhaps I should clarify my point with an example.

Let's say I am the manager of the trees domain.  You have a company
that sells trees, so you register sodnow.trees.  Everything's fine and
peachy, until the day I decide to file Chapter 11, or I get tired of
the registry business, and I quit.  I turn off my servers that were
pointing queries to your sites.

So even if you "own" the name sodnow.trees, it doesn't really have
much value if no one can access any resources associated with that
name.  The only way that you can guarantee that you can realize the
"value" of your name is if you are the registry, not just the domain
name contact.  You have to be the person who can guarantee that when
the name sodnow.trees is used, that it takes one to those network
resources associated with sondow.trees.  In effect, you need to be
able to guarantee that you can publish the "string" sondow.trees, not
just the component 'sondow' that exists relative to 'trees'.

--gregbo