While some people are focusing on cancelling meetings, we should note that the RIPE CENTR meeting will be held September 22, 1998. http://www.ripe.net/centr/meetings/centr-4/index.html RIPE is one of the more open (and fair) organizations on the Internet. Even though they are mostly focused on IPv4 allocations, they have discovered the merits of being involved with the evolution of TLDs. From an IPv8 point of view, this is a good thing. People tried to divide the world by claiming that IP addresses and domain names have nothing to do with each other. That may be true from a technical sense but is not the case from a business and industry point of view. It is costly to have IP-only registries and those costs are passed on to ISPs and the consumers. In my opinion, it is better to have each of the TLD registries handle a small part of the IP allocation load. This helps to keep the cost down, to spread the resources around in a more fair and equitable manner and helps facilitate the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. This is essentially what IPv8 helps do. Again, I suggest the real issues are with IP address allocations. The TLD issues fall out once the IP resources are allocated fairly. IP addresses are like land and domain names are like billboards. The farmers that control the land along the information superhighway ultimately control the billboards on the highway. Jim Fleming Unir Corporation - http://www.unir.com End-2-End: VPC(Java)---C+ at ---<IPv8>---C+ at ---(Java)VPC http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/130dftmail/unir.txt http://www.ddj.com/index/author/idx10133.htm -------- Logged at Tue Sep 8 19:03:18 MET DST 1998 ---------