On Fri, 6 Dec 1996 01:35:47 +1100 (EST), David Keegel <djk&#167;cyber.com.au>
wrote:
>...
[deleted much worthwhile stuff for brevity]
>...
>The idea of "acn.au" has been kicked around here a bit recently, but
>I'm not convinced that there will be a lot of market demand for this.
>As some people may have found with id.au (and maybe .us) there's not
>a lot of point in setting up a nice, sensible, scalable hierarchy if
>no one wants to use it.

Any interest in <number>.<area>.ph.au ?

>What about having a domain designed for products/services/trademarks?
>This is something which is not catered for in the existing .au system
>(apart from registering within the company's domain).
>
>I'm sure Smith's would be quite interested in being able to advertise
>something like www.twisties.prod.au.  The number of www.<movie>.com
>addresses suggests that this is something the market is prepared to
>pay for.

This may seem good for trade mark holders and current users, but
it requires 34 classes beneath a trade mark domain to avoid collisions
(and a mere 8 classes for service marks).

I have no idea whether twisties come under class 29 (includes cooked
vegetables & milk products), 30 (includes confectionary), or 31 (includes
misc. agricultural and horticultural products).

So back to improved directory services (or clicking the browse button on the
remote while the twisties ad is on) ...

Trade mark info is available at http://www.aipo.gov.au/tpd/tm/tmarks.htm

(How did I find this URL?  I tried www.aipo.org.au, then www.aipo.gov.au.
This was at least 10 times faster than using a web index, and had only one
useless hit.)

>The next argument is whether it is better to educate/frustrate the
>people who don't understand that the DNS is not a directory service,
>by creating more domains to choose from (making it harder for people
>to mis-use as if it were a directory service); or to yield to what
>the market wants, however dumb that might be.
>

I thought that the computer industry had already decided that
it is not "dumb" to want convenience.

>...
[deleted more worthwhile stuff for brevity]



-- g.