|Meaning that the domain name that the client has purchased, and wishes to
|tell people about, is no longer useful. It's rather like purchasing a
|listing in a German telephone book to map your name to your number; and
|then telling all your clients they need to be able to speak German before
|they can call you.

No, the analogy is that they need to find a phone connected to a specific
flavour of the Telephone network for that phonenumber to map to the party
they intend to call. If they happen to use a different phone, the number
might
reach someone totally different. And the notion of which network one
specific
phone is connected to would be likely to change by the minute, based on the
decisions and whims of each telco, subscriber etc.


If that had been the case, telephone would never have taken off
(I actually believe that the situation was somewhat akin to this, each
country (and possibly operator) having different country-codes for each
other country. Luckily a standard administered bythe ITU was agreed on, and
lots of cost incurred switching over to this, along with some victims
that lost their 'nice' prefixes. With the Internet, we should try and
apply the lessons learned and not make such mistakes again, especially
as the stakes are so much higher [ too many individual decisionmakers
involved at each level: TLD operators, registries, registrars, ISPs,
company DNS admins etc. Just finding some consensus among the majority
of any one of the groups will be almost impossible, let along among
all of them] )

In Internet terms that means, that while most company users may only
be at the whim of their MIS department as to which TLDs they resolve,
most dialup users will be at the whim of their ISP. It gets worse for
travellers that dial into remote ISPs, use Hotel networks etc.
Finally, it's not even true that each user might have the chance to make
such
a decision themselves, even if they ran full nameservers on each
workstation or client machine (and had the leisure, inclinationand
sufficient
information to try to make that decision themselves). Lots of Internet
traffic requires
a remote system (be it an MX host, the peer etc) to be able to perform
the same or related DNS lookups, and should those systems not see a certain
TLD or resolve it differently, email may get bounced, firewalls or other
security measures may make the wrong decision etc etc etc.

Mathias

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