I do not accept the "vanity" distinction.
It's not about you, or what you'd like to accept. Really, we understand that you want to register personal vanity domains, you want to have your personal information obscured, and you want someone else to pay for the costs of all that. Maybe this position seemed to make sense in 1996, but it's absurd nostalgia now. The vast majority of individual Internet users, like 99.999%, do fine without their own second level domain. There's nothing wrong with having your own domain (I have a bunch of them) but it is not ICANN's job to solve your problem if you want the terms to be different from what everyone else gets. I used to have a T1 phone line to my house. Since the vast majority of T1 users are businesses, the only price available is the expensive business rate. I did not spend a lot of time complaining about how outrageous it was that I had to pay the same price and take the same terms as IBM, even though I was not a business. Deal with it. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly