Yup, it's all about capitalism, and nothing about technical correctness.*sigh*
The long-term maximization of ROI requires technical correctness.
Unfortunately there is often alot of arbitrage by people with
very short-term goals. Sadly, some of the worst technologies are
the ones that get lots of short-term interest.
Sean.
Slightly off-topic here, but am I the only one who is concerned by the
fact that virtually all businesses define "ultra long term" as 5 years or
less? It seems that 5 years is about the limits of Capitalism's
vision... The Internet, while very young, is still 5 or 6 times that old.
Maybe the politicians and managers, by virtue of being politicians and
managers, should not be allowed to be politicians and managers. Yes, I
think that made sense, but it's 7am and I haven't slept yet tonight so I
can't be sure.
Matthew Devney
Needs Caffeine
Sean:
Yes, but... Now don't get me wrong, my offer to let new.net pay me to
screw up our DNS was mostly toung-in-cheek. However, we are all slaves to
the ecconomics of this business. I'm sure something is changing hands to
establish the aliances they already have. At what price point are you
willing to cooperate and if doing so enables you to expand or provide
other services for your customers, isn't that the right thing to do?
On another tangent, as much money as these people seem to throw away, I
doubt they have enough to pay every significant network sufficiently to
gain their cooperation. Realizing that, the only rational thing to do is
to gain the cooperation of some key networks as leverage to force other
competing services into submission. Frankly, that kind of approach sets me
off pretty quick and my natural reaction is to get in their face and
become a roadblock. Still, if I was one of the few selected ones
benifitting from this rollout, I'd be working to see it succeed
also. Could that be why we see what appears to be competing opinions on
this topic?
Chuck
[ On Friday, March 16, 2001 at 06:48:03 (-0800), smd@clock.org wrote: ]
Subject: RE: I've just tried new.net's plugin. Don't.
The long-term maximization of ROI requires technical correctness.
Unfortunately there is often alot of arbitrage by people with
very short-term goals. Sadly, some of the worst technologies are
the ones that get lots of short-term interest.
Reminds me of BGP filters being set at /19 prefix lengths.... 
I'm going to answer that as I'm probably one of those competing opinions. Einar Stefferud (ORSC Chairman) and myself (I have no personal stake in either Verisign or New.net) had a good long conversation with New.net today. New.net have a business plan and are just doing what all the other .COMs are doing - trying to make a living as fast and quickly as the next. They are an incubator company within IdeaLab. They don't even have their own dedicated office space yet, they pool resources (conference rooms/copiers) with the other IdeaLab companies. They do know how register domain names and how to contact the media and government. They are not so good at juggling breakable objects.
The Internet works on the principles of cooperation and this is the driving force behind ORSC. The basic premise of ORSC is an idea - of how trust and cooperation functions on the Internet regardless of any financial consideration or marketing budget. It helps to have money, but ORSC has existed without it since 1997. The ORSC root contains women-owned small businesses and giant multi-nationals side-by-side. As a result, it's an idea that can't be killed just by pulling the plug on the funding. New.net, on the other hand, will last as long as there is money in the bank.
As far as the ORSC goes, there is no financial incentive or kickback to ORSC. It is possible that TLD managers recognized by the ORSC root may enter into relationships with New.net, just like they do with Verisign or Tucows or their local pizza delivery service or upstream provider (let's not go there!). I'm not aware of any such relationships but wouldn't be surprised if they happened as a result of ironing out the New.net TLD collisions.
Unfortunately, the most interesting remark I found was one describing Bill Gross, the founder of IdeaLab. Somebody mentioned about him "having an idea and funding it without thought for the real world consequences". So yes, what New.net have done was not thought through as carefully as it might have been. Chalk it up to experience. Y'all can now say "we told you so".
If New.net carry on without thought for the consequences, I'm sure they will become as popular as the other defunct IdeaLab ventures. If they choose to cooperate with the rest of the community, avoid the TLD naming conflicts somehow (we're trying to find some common ground to make this a reality), and stop making big waves into your routers and help desks then there has been some positive progress.
Best Regards,
Simon Higgs