Domain Names Once Again Fetch Top Dollar

You've misunderstood what I meant.

There's nothing much you can do with registries that choose to hoard or that choose to not limit registraions. However, if there were many registries available and many of those registries "chose" to place limits on the number of registrations or at least allow only one registration per five minutes (or two minutes or one minute), making it tedious to register several domains...

My point is that if there were many such registries who opted for these practices and also did not hoard themselves people might well gravitate to those registries making it harder for those whose practices were unfavorable to compete.

It's a "best practices" type of attititude in keeping with the original intent of having domain names.

At the same time, this riduculous trademark protection garbage with defensive registrations would be somewhat meaningless with these practices and a plethora of registries available.

We are not going to be able to control what individual registries do, but we could mitigate the problems with many choices.

I keep hearing about customer confusion, yet we don't see a problem with increasing numbers of area codes for phone numbers where the numbers are identical aside from those area codes. People tend to get used to multiple choices when they've been around for a bit. In addition, we have several ccTLDs that are in wide use with the same mnemonic domains as we find in com/net/org and people seem to get along just fine.

I just feel that the problems we see today with the ICANN accredited registries could be offset if there were a few hundred available registries. Of course there are many outside of ICANN and many of those have the types of limitations I described. So do many of the ccTLDs. It seems to work pretty well and still leaves choice up to the marketplace rather than having them overly regulated.

I don't think regulating the registries to the point where they can't afford to function is the answer either. Consumers become pretty smart when they have the choice to shop around for the best solution to their own needs. I truly believe that if there were many registries (TLDs) the market really would shake out those who did not serve the public well. In addition, people would simply get used to having to include what comes after that last "dot" when they consider what domain to search for instead of assuming ".com." It's just become habit because it was the only game in town for so long.

It's a shame that the ICANN version of .biz was so mishandled. That's why it hasn't done well, IMO. Had limitations been placed on registrations (as I described), we would not have seen so much hoarding and speculation. That registry has failed, IMO. Since that one is rather close to my heart, I'm sorry to see what they did with it. If I thought ICANN would learn from all these fiascos, I might feel better. However, history tells us that nothing has been learned or gained from that experiment and too many have been disenfranchised for nothing.

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