VRx is pleased to respond
to the notice at http://www.ICANN.org/yokohama/new-tld-topic.htm#V
and hereby submits this expression of interest in having ICANN ask
the Department of Commerce add the top level domains we operate to
the legacy root zone.
We feel that by aggregating
a handful of tlds, an economy of scale kicks in that might otherwise
prevent domains that may be useful and needed but not "killer" domains
like say .com or .web would be, from seeing the light of day. Given
the sort of numbers that we've seen so far for TLD "application fees"
this seems prudent. For example, would .INT with 53 domains in 15
years of existence have come into being if the barrier to entry was
in the $50,000 USD ballpark?
Here are the domains we
feel would be useful and have run for several years now:
FAQ
It is hoped the answer
to any question "xxx" can be found at "xxx.faq".
LIST
We feel mailing lists
are one of the more important services on the Internet and the
influx of unsophisticated users seem, in our experience, to have
a hard time remembering addresses of these lists. if, for any
topic "xxx" there are resources at "xxx.list" that are the list
itself or pointers to the list we feel this would be demystifying.
800 & 888
A mapping between 800/888
telephone numbers and the DNS.
PRICES
Consumer information/prices
for various things.
DDS
For dentists.
LLB
For lawyers.
NIC
In a 500 domain universe,
the question of where to find the registry for any domain becomes
even more muddled than it is now. To this end we have deployed
n 1996 the .NIC registry. Anybody that uses 199.166.24.1 for DNS
name service can find any existing registry of the form "xxx"
by going to "http://www.nic" and is intended to serve as a "registry
of registries". We believe it is in the best interest of the Internet
for this schema to resolve globally.
GALLERY
For image galleries.
As far as a business model
goes, we understand the well articulated positions of the "non-profit"
and "for-profit" arguments and would like to introduce the idea of
"low-profit"; that is we feel we should get paid for this but prefer
to think of the model used by the original InterNIC project "for and
by the Internet community"; talk of "ownership" and "public ownership/offering"
is held to be inappropriate. These should not be seen as cash cows
but as a service to the community that we have been a part of for
15 years - it is an a sense "giving something back".
These tlds were deployed
inbetween 1996 and 1997 and have been in continuous operation and
are reachable from the ORSC, TINC and other private root server confederations.
Components of a domain
registry system such as whois servers and associated tools that were
developed for this project have been placed in the public domain and
are in use by, for example the Canadian top level domain .CA and others.
We intend to formally apply
to ICANN to have these names recognized in the USG controlled legacy
root zone as soon as there is a process to do so.
Richard Sexton
VRx Network Services, Inc.
