On 07/28/2010 12:21 PM, Bill Silverstein wrote:
I agree that the domain should stop working, no name service at all, the moment it expires, since that's the most reliable way to get people's attention. ...
It is a most effective and tested means. It has worked for utilities companies for years. The customer coming home to find that the power has been turned off quickly gets the customer's attention.
You must live in a benign climate. Doing that in places with harsh climates at certain times of year could bring civil penalties or even jail time. Moving to a larger scope, I am amused at the degree of conflation of DNS with the world wide web. Domain names are used quite frequently for things that have nothing to do with HTTP/HTTPS based services. Indeed sometimes DNS is used simply to convey data - like public keys, RFID tag meanings, or whether somerhing is on someone's black list. By-the-way, the best cure to expiration is to go back and review one simple question: Q. Why did ICANN create a ten year limit on name registrations in the first place? A. Because. Yes simply "because". There was no decision, no debate, no rationale, no criteria. It was imposed by fiat. There is no particular reason why domain names can't be acquired permanently, or at least as long as the TLD exists. That's what I will do in my .ewe TLD - one fee gets you a name in perpetuity. (The business model is to obtain revenue for management services on the name, not from the ICANN model of yearly rent for the name. -- See http://eweregistry.cavebear.com/ and http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000159.html ) If names don't expire than we don't need to worry about "post-expiration domain name recovery". Given that we are entering a world in which a consequential part of a person's life work might be on the net, the it makes sense for domain names to have very long lives - at least as long, or longer, than the duration of the copyright in any works that might be referenced via that domain name. --karl--