On 08/17/2009 10:46 AM, Chris McElroy 786-317-8774 wrote:
Honestly Karl, I wish domain names cost $100/year. There could be a hardship claus that people could apply for or something if they really can't afford a domain name. But at $100/year, we would have less spammers and scammers using domain names and speculators would own a much smaller list of domain names.
Similarly my wife and I wish that airplane tickets cost what they did back in the 1970's (with adjustments for inflation), that way a typical flight would be well over $1000 which would discourage people bringing undisciplined children and would allow the airlines to give better service. The point of this is that we all tend to seek to regulate the behaviour of others; we have a natural tendency to seek to impose anti-competitive rules to satisfy our own personal desires. Competition, particularly in a technology based area, brings change. The primary argument against open competition (competing roots) in the DNS area is that it would bring the possibility of change that might disturb some people. That argument, however, leads to stasis. It could have been used by the telegraph people to argue that email would be duplicative and would confuse people. And the introduction of the push-button tone-dial telephone certainly brought some confusion - "what are those # and * buttons for?" My wife's mother was confused by her cell phone because it had no dial tone. If we were to use the arguments that fly around DNS then we ought to ban mobile phones. You are, of course, free to pay a lot of money for domain names, I don't think registrars will turn you down. But the choice of one ought not to be imposed onto the many. --karl--