At 17:40 3/12/96 +1000, you wrote:
>>My main problem with this proposal is a reasoning behind it.  How is
>>.biz.au different from .com.au?  .com denotes the domain is a commercial
>>one.  .biz denotes it is a business?  In what way is this any different
>>from .com.au?  Why not just have Internode and IInet competing with
>>Melbourne IT in the .com.au space? (their delegation is non-exclusive)
>
>I would be absolutely delighted to be offering a competing registry service
>in the com.au name space. I'm sure Michael would too.

If you consider 2LD's to exist for the purpose of organization, there should
be a distinction between the criteria for com.au and biz.au domains(ie. com
is for Companies and biz is for registered Businesses).  Unfortunately, the
work involved with culling all of the non-companies out of com.au and into
biz.au would make this otherwise common sense re-organization unworkable.

Given the huge number of entries in com.au compared to the other 2LDs in au
the introduction of a different 2LD that competes with com.au would seem
like a move towards disorganizing things.  Hell, 2LDs as they exist are not
serving the purpose of distributing numbers evenly... if we take away their
oganizational role by allowing more than one 2LD to have the same meaning,
the point of having 2LDs at all is vastly diminished.

The proposal for MelbourneIT to wait for the introduction of a competing
entity before snapping up the entire existing customer base on some
arbitrary date makes complete sense. Aside from some pain in the butt
situations where a domain has been re-delegated from one ISP to another,
working with renewal dates based on ISP records is also quite reasonable.

To me it seems to be fairly clear what _should_ happen.

A second (or more) .com.au authority should be formed, unfortunately we are
still out in the cold on how to do this.  I don't think there is any
shortage of those who would be willing to take it up (most of them would by
ISP's of course, which creates it own problems, but that's not the point here).

Domains should then be renewed on their anniversary as it can best be
determined under an authority of the domain owners choice in a competitive
market.

Cheers

Brett

----
Brett Caird		Chief Executive/Director
brettc§bit.net.au	http://www.bit.net.au/
Brisbane Internet Technology Pty Ltd