Brendler, Beau ha scritto:

Given the (lofty) W3C language, "Our goal is to convince the DNS industry and ICANN to support more actively the ongoing technical development of the Web and Internet for the global, common good, and to promote the stability, utility, and universal accessibility of these platforms," we should consider supporting this effort, or a similar one, yes?

I'm not sure I understand what does the W3C have to do with the DNS (more than, say, Mozilla or Wikipedia or lots of other commendable efforts at the application/content level). In any case, it seems to me that what they are saying is "hey! there's going to be a lot of money floating around new SLDs/TLDs, so why don't we try to get some for ourselves?", which leads us back to an old argument: there are people who think that domain names should be heavily taxed to finance "pro bono" activities such as standards development and other projects, and others who think that no taxes should be imposed so that end users can get domain names at the lowest possible price. The current compromise is that ICANN gets $0.22 per gTLD registration to fund itself; also, the average line of thought in the ICANN community is that gTLD application fees should cover the costs of the process, but not more than that. Personally I'm not so sure that we should support additional fees - either on registrants or on TLD applicants, in the end it's the same - and I'm a bit concerned about creating one more fat collector of registrant money that will spend that money at its own will. I'd rather let registrants decide for themselves whether they want to spend their money to fund the W3C or whatever other collective effort. -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------