ICANN|ARCHIVES

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

VRx is pleased to respond to the notice at http://www.ICANN.org/yokohama/new-tld-topic.htm#V and hereby submits this expression of interest in having ICANN ask the Department of Commerce add the top level domains we operate to the legacy root zone.

We feel that by aggregating a handful of tlds, an economy of scale kicks in that might otherwise prevent domains that may be useful and needed but not "killer" domains like say .com or .web would be, from seeing the light of day. Given the sort of numbers that we've seen so far for TLD "application fees" this seems prudent. For example, would .INT with 53 domains in 15 years of existence have come into being if the barrier to entry was in the $50,000 USD ballpark?

Here are the domains we feel would be useful and have run for several years now:

FAQ

It is hoped the answer to any question "xxx" can be found at "xxx.faq".

LIST

We feel mailing lists are one of the more important services on the Internet and the influx of unsophisticated users seem, in our experience, to have a hard time remembering addresses of these lists. if, for any topic "xxx" there are resources at "xxx.list" that are the list itself or pointers to the list we feel this would be demystifying.

800 & 888

A mapping between 800/888 telephone numbers and the DNS.

PRICES

Consumer information/prices for various things.

DDS

For dentists.

LLB

For lawyers.

NIC

In a 500 domain universe, the question of where to find the registry for any domain becomes even more muddled than it is now. To this end we have deployed n 1996 the .NIC registry. Anybody that uses 199.166.24.1 for DNS name service can find any existing registry of the form "xxx" by going to "http://www.nic" and is intended to serve as a "registry of registries". We believe it is in the best interest of the Internet for this schema to resolve globally.

GALLERY

For image galleries.

As far as a business model goes, we understand the well articulated positions of the "non-profit" and "for-profit" arguments and would like to introduce the idea of "low-profit"; that is we feel we should get paid for this but prefer to think of the model used by the original InterNIC project "for and by the Internet community"; talk of "ownership" and "public ownership/offering" is held to be inappropriate. These should not be seen as cash cows but as a service to the community that we have been a part of for 15 years - it is an a sense "giving something back".

These tlds were deployed inbetween 1996 and 1997 and have been in continuous operation and are reachable from the ORSC, TINC and other private root server confederations.

Components of a domain registry system such as whois servers and associated tools that were developed for this project have been placed in the public domain and are in use by, for example the Canadian top level domain .CA and others.

We intend to formally apply to ICANN to have these names recognized in the USG controlled legacy root zone as soon as there is a process to do so.

Richard Sexton
VRx Network Services, Inc.