[ncdnhc-discuss] Fwd:Concerning a restricted .org (again)

[Milton Mueller]

A few final observations:

* any analogy to .museum is inappropriate. Museum is a NEW domain,
.org is the fourth largest in the world, with 2 and a half million
legacy registrations. You can create any little sandbox you like in a 
new domain. Whatever you learn from it doesn't apply to this situation.

* No one has ever made any case as to what the value-add
of restricting .org is, especially when it is combined with 
grandfathering existing registrants. .org is already mixed,
yet it's basic identity is clear. Nothing to gain, a lot of extra costs 
and risks by imposing restrictions. This is why we rejected the
idea back in July.

* .org is not viable as a competitor to .com (that's why it has
10 times fewer registrations, a fact that's rather hard to argue with).
Any new manager, even a totally commercially minded one, 
would have to differentiate it in some way. With a non-profit
owner representative of noncommercial Internet users, we 
can trust that the differentiation will take the right direction.
Indeed, Kent's argument that .org will grow into a mighty commercial
competitor to com is dishonest, evident from the fact that even the 
com domain is not growing in this post-boom economy. .ORG will
either find a way to reach its natural constituency of non-profits
and miscellaneous users, or it will shrink.

* Nothing in any document associated with the original
definition of .org (RFC 920, 1591) uses the term "noncommercial." 
Any RFC written before the rise of the Web and the imposition
of fees for domain registrations is utterly irrelevant to this
situation, anyway, because the "original intent" was for a completely
different world - an Internet limited to military, research and
education users.