NSI and competition to RIPE and APNIC

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Carl writes:

And the outcome of all this affects every Nanog member. It affects every
network operator, every ISP, every sysop. It affects the 1.2 million
owners of the 1.2 million domain names in COM and NET and ORG. Every
network operator, every SIP, every sysop, every domain name owner, should
pay attention to all of this and speak up.

Carl, I don't think there are 1.2 million domain name registrants as many
domains (like CyberPromo, for example) has registered multiple domains names.

Nowadays, taking annual fees into account, the number of parties owning
thousands of domain names is dropping quickly. Okay, so let's say it is a
ten-to-one ratio (which it's not, I believe it is more like 1.5 to one)
then the number of domain name owners would still be 120,000. And those
120,000 owners should still be speaking up, in the absence of which things
may happen that they won't like later.

That being said, there is already an alternative in the county code domains.
There, the policies are different (though not necessarily better) than NSI.

That is no comfort at all, none whatsoever, to someone who has invested
years of time and sweat and energy and money in a COM domain name. If the
answer is, "Hey, you don't like NSI's domain name policy? So give up your
domain name and start over again in a two-letter domain!" then it is no
answer at all.

That's not to say that the exising gTLD infrastructure does not need to
evolve. It must. I agree with you that those who are domain name registrants
in the current gTLDs have a stake in this evolution and should express a
thoughtful and constructive opinion on how this evolution should take place.
Unfortunately, some who have expressed opinions have chosen not to be
either thoughtful or constructive. I think some operators have been reluctant
to participate because of this.

As I am sure you are also aware, the present structure of the .US domain is
unworkable for any business that is located in more than one state, or for
any business that thinks it might ever move from one state to another.
There ought to be a .com.us, for example, and at present there isn't one.

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[...]

As I am sure you are also aware, the present structure of the .US domain is
unworkable for any business that is located in more than one state, or for
any business that thinks it might ever move from one state to another.

Since over the past many decades, having to use a specific street address in
a specific city and state hasn't been "unworkable" for multinational
corporations to do business anywhere, I hardly think that a .US domain
address should be any different. I am not aware of any restrictions in the
.US domain spec that says you have to restrict your Internet business or
Internet operational reach to any locality.

Likewise, businesses have moved from one state to another in the past and
the change of address has not been "unworkable." Difficult sometimes and
inconvenient often, but not unworkable.

There ought to be a .com.us, for example, and at present there isn't one.

The US is different from most other nations in that we have a federation of
states, a specific internal division of several semi-autonomous political
and geographic entities to divide things down to more manageable size.
Besides, it helps deepen the DNS heirarchy. In a nation of our size and
economic activity, that is very helpful and perhaps necessary. Creating
.com.us does very little to help the name overlap problems we see in the
current .com domain. It just adds 3 more characters to most of the domain
names.

Ya picks your system: geographic heirarchy (.US), category types (IAHC),
even Barry Shein's phone number system, and ya gets your goods and your
bads. It all depends on which problems you care most about solving. None of
the systems does them all. None of them can be classified as "unworkable."