Simon Hackett wrote:

> >>As I said before, my main problem with your proposal is the inconsistency
> >>of having two commercial domains which do essentially the same thing.  If I
> >>want to find Microsoft Australia, it seems logical to look at
> >>www.microsoft.com.au.  To have to check www.microsoft.biz.au seems rather
> >>redundant and would probably mean most companies would go for both.
> 
> No, you read their URL on their products, or on their TV adverts, or on

Not true. I frequently locate organisations by guessing a URL. VERY
FREQUENTLY. This practice is so widespread that organisations choosing
unconventional URLs for their homepage find themselves registering the
conventional structure as well. (home.netscape.com springs to mind.)

There appears to be an inconsistency in what you are arguing. On the one
hand you are suggesting that what your domain is called is of no
importance at all, whilst on the other, registry services require some
demonstration of your entitlement to the name that you are registering.
If indeed the name is of no importance, then why require any proof of
anything. Why not allow me to register ibm.biz.au without any
demonstration of my "right" to use that name.

I don't yet see the middleground. (One component of your URL is
significant, but the rest is not?) So it seems that you can argue (a)
that the name is important and therefore that the 2LD IS important or
(b) that the name is not important, in which case you should allow
anyone to register anything, or perhaps you should simply require the
use of names like 123-456-789.acn.au.

In human affairs, naming IS important: the name of an infant, a street,
a nation, a project, a brand of peanut butter, whatever. I believe that
making an attempt to keep the naming sensible is worthwhile. I
acknowledge that a (tiny) proportion of commercial organisations in
Australia have names in wierdo domains, but the vast majority have
chosen to use com.au, even despite the long delays that held up requests
when Mr. Elz was running the com.au registry on a volunteer basis.

> funding the overheads required to support your database entry. Just be
> careful about confusing database entries with rights to a name outside of
> the Internet world.

It is a mistake to pretend that these things are indpendent. The very
fact that registries require some attempt to demonstrate your right to
use a name before allowing registration demonstrates this.

Anyway, there is another point. If the names themsevles are not
important, if it is not worthwhile to try to get to the point where
competing entities can maintain the one address space, why then bother
with joint/multiple administration of the biz.au namespace? Why not
create biz.au and bozo.au and administer them seperately? If the move
towards joint administration of a namespace is worth anything, why not
do it with the widely accepted domain for registering commercial
entities in Australia.

Simon, there's a lot in this post. To avoid the creation of a flame, I
suggest that the one useful response that you can make to this posting
is to explain why it is that you think that the third from the right
component of a name is important whilst the rest are not, or if you do
not think this, what you do think about the policy of most registries of
requiring an applicant to demonstrate a right to use a name in the real
world before registration.

-- 

      - Raz

"It often upsets a man's God fantasies to have   (Misquoted? from     )
someone shoot down one of his helicopters."      (Ben Elton's "Stark" )