>Lets open up a new set of 20 TLDs under .au and sell them to the highest
>bidder in order to fund the forums and NOCs and auDAs, ADNAs etc etc

There's nothing new under the sun

www.aunic.net/doms.html - August 1996.

to quote:...

"This proposal is, as noted previously, intended to address the current
issues of scaling of the demand for Internet domain names by
increasing the levels of supply of domain names. It is intended to
facilitate the administration of the domain name system within the
Internet in Australia by preserving the basic operational integrity of
the DNS itself and opening up a competitive environment of supply of
delegated domain names.

"However this proposal, of increased levels of supply of SLDs is, in
its present form, as functionally flawed as the current environment of
processing bottlenecks within the current set of SLDs in that neither 
process can definitively ensure the continued value and utility of the
.au Domain Name environment itself, at least in its current
form.

"It is noted that in increasing the number of second level domain names
there is a distinct risk of over compensation and a distinct risk to
the overall perceived integrity of the environment. The integrity
perception issue will be problematical with the likely entry of
operators into the environment who see this is an opportunity to
generate income without undertaking any service obligations associated
with the task. Irrespective of the administrative preconditions
imposed on DAs there will be incidents of scam-based trading practices
without doubt. The over compensation risk lies in the proliferation of
SLDs, and the consequent devaluation the inherent utility of the name
system. For example, if there are some 1,000 second level domain names
and a named entity of "xyz" a search for the "right" xxx where
the "xyz" of interest is named as in xyz.xxx.au may be
prohibitively lengthy and may not yield a definitive result. The
alternative is that entity "xyz" request a name in every available SLD
category - an unwieldy and probably expensive course of action which
will not be successful in every case, and if commonly attempted simply
negates the value of having SLDs in the first place (the comparable
observation is that immediately increasing the number of distinct
categories within the Yellow Pages directory listing by one or more
orders of magnitude would make the directory functionally
useless). This proposal therefore is not a solution to the expectation
of name functionality that many users of the Internet implicitly
expect with the name system, as the equation of the name system to a
de facto Internet directory service is a strongly entrenched
belief."


Is it too much to ask to stop recycling over paths we've trodden time
and time and time again with this topic?

    Geoff