Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 09:46:46 +0100 From: Daniel Karrenberg <Daniel.Karrenberg@ripe.net> Message-ID: <9511100846.AA11630@ncc.ripe.net> 1) Do not register individuals. This is only temporary relief but it may last a few years. That doesn't work either, the individuals just pretend to be businesses. 2) Register individuals in geographic subdomains, approaching postal addresses. This would work if you could convince the people that the domain registration just says something about how they registered, and nothing about them as they exist. While this is certainly true, technically, in people's minds it isn't, they seem to believe that if their domain name is foo.melb.vic.au and they move to Sydney they have to change domain names. That's not a good impression to leave (apart from causing them to unnecessarily change their domain name, it also adds to registry work for no particular good purpose). 3) Register individuals in arbitrary subdomains. One scheme proposed was something like Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU> wrote a quite elaborate proposal for something like this back in Oct 94. I do not know the extent to which it has been a success but people might want to look at the id.au domain. Its actually still just starting. That's mostly due to my laziness (or how busy I am, or however you like to phrase it). That is, at each step along the way of setting it up, I inserted an arbitrary delay of about 4-5 months... It is mostly running now though, and seems OK, though as yet we have not a lot of registrations. For those who don't know of it, the arbitrary string in our case is currently a label that refers to some Australian flora or fauna - however we can use anything as the need arises. For us, one level is enough, we're pretty sure that 10000 entries in a domain is manageable, that means we could have 10000 domains each with 10000 individuals, which is, I think 100 million, which is just plenty for Australia for a very long time. My personal opinion is 1) Never register individuals under a TLD. I agree totally - in fact, my personal opinion is to only register (large) classes in a TLD, that is, all end user domains are at least 3 levels. I know that many Eurpoean contry registries don't agree however. kre