On 5/19/07, John L <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:

To follow up to Danny's recent message and to the one I sent out about
.travel, it seems likely that the sponsor for .travel will go bust within
the next month.  Unlike registerfly, there's no problem of losing the
data, since Neustar runs the day to day operations.

The question is what should happen to a domain that dies.  Should it just
wind up, no new registrations, the existing ones end when they end?
(That may take up to ten years, the maximum registration period.)

Presumably when Tralliance goes, ICANN will look for a new sponsor.  What
if no new sponsor appears?  Given what a dud .travel is, that's quite
possible.  Should ICANN pay Neustar or someone to keep it going anyway?

Assuming that long-term stability is good, having .travel suddenly
disappear would be bad.  But having it live on as a zombie with nobody
caring whether the domains continue to meet the sponsorship rules wouldn't
be so great either.

In the particular case of .travel, it's so small and obscure that it
hardly matters to users what happens.  But if ICANN carries through with
plans to add lots more TLDs, someday a domain that's big enough to matter
will fail, and it would be a good idea to have a plan in place beyond
having the data not get lost.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.

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