People seem to have no problem allowing the 2 letter TLDs to be grandfathered to have immunity from the Green Paper and the U.S. Government. The assumption appears to be that the 2 letter TLDs have been delegated to individuals, companies and in some cases governments with care. This is not necessarily the case. In my opinion, the 2 letter TLDs should be treated as generic tags and should not be given a pass when it comes to requirements for stable governance and operational excellence. If this is not done, consumers may be mislead that 2 letter TLDs have the same industry oversight via the IANA Inc. and self-regulation. Consumers may find that they are subjected to arbitrary policies, predatory price increases and shoddy operations unless they are warned that 2 letter TLDs are immune from IANA Inc. oversight. This will not be a good thing and may cause well-run 2 letter TLDs to suffer because of the unsatisfactory practices of a few, poorly managed 2 letter TLDs. Of course, part of the problem is defining what poorly managed means. In some parts of the world business practices may be tolerated that are not common in the U.S. For example, people may choose to discriminate based on a variety of reasons. One of the most obvious is that companies supporting the government obtain <SLD>.TLD registrations and those that do not are excluded. Much of this assumes that the government is the current delegate of the 2 letter TLDs. As the domain name debates rage on we find more and more that governments do not have a clue what is happening with the 2 letter TLD that was supposedly delegated to them. Instead, we find that the 2 letter TLDs have been casually delegated to people and companies that gave the right impression of representing the government or local people but who actually use the TLD for their own business purposes. None of these things can be easily fixed and there may be no need to fix them IF the consumer is alerted to this situation. Unfortunately, the Green Paper and the IANA Inc. might end up sending the wrong message if they require generic TLDs to be held to one standard while 2 letter TLDs are immune. In my opinion, all of the TLDs should be held to the same high standards of business ethics and operational integrity as agreed upon by the Registry Industry. The question remains as to how to do this...? To date much of the focus has been on ADDING TLDs to the legacy Root Name Servers that the U.S. Government supports. Before TLDs are added, there may have to be a review of the existing TLDs to see where they stand from a business ethics and operational standards point of view. In some cases, 2 letter TLDs may need to be removed from the legacy Root Name Servers. How this should be handled needs to be debated by the people actively involved in the Registry Industry. - Jim Fleming Unir Corporation IBC, Tortola, BVI http://www.nic.vi -------- Logged at Mon Apr 27 22:47:06 MET DST 1998 ---------