[Chapter-delegates] ISOC England Chapter Statement regarding direct.uk consultation

[Marcin Cieslak]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2013, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:

> Dear ISOC Chapter leaders,
> 
> Nominet has recently conducted a consultation on a proposal involving
> registration of domains directly at the second level, thus changing the
> current system of having a limited second level set of domains and
> allowing registration at third level.

OMG. Every three-level registry is facing this challenge at some point.

It reminds me the old NASK (.pl CCTLD) policy to have .com.pl, .edu.pl
etc. for pretty much everyone and .pl only if you could demonstrate
you have at least three locations in the country connected by leased
lines. 

Eventually somewhere in 1997 they gave up and they started to sign
up everyone under .pl (it was only more expensive) - and today
third-level domains (.org.pl, .com.pl...) are more expensive than
.pl because of the lower market interest.

Is Nominet going back to pre-1995 policies where domain name
registries wanted to be alfas and omegas deciding how the
domain name system looked like? (I remeber checking zone
syntax and nameservers by hand by registry staff etc.).

My guess is just to offer some "added value" (whatever it might be)
to the customers right now to get the money twice from pretty
much everyone. After some time, as it happens with certificate
authorities, we will see that everything gets relaxed and 
direct .uk registrations will be open to everyone the same way
as all others are. Current proposal is just a blabla to try to
contain the imminent land grab I suppose. Why not call it
a "sunrise period" and stop pretending they are in control.

//Marcin