[governance] The Road Ahead and the .COM Migration

[Jim Fleming]

The .COM name-space is large and popular and appears to have gained
some interest from ordinary people in the proof-of-concept market trials
and market tests, orchestrated mostly by the U.S. Government via the
NSF and DOC. The U.S. Government has said that they want to get out
of the .COM business and these market trials and let the free markets sort
it out. In the next 12 months, the .COM users will be faced with a move to
the real .NET. They of course will have an opportunity to bring their names
with them, to make them more stable, more secure, and to actually own the
device(s) that prove they own the name(s). They had no real ownership in
the market trials run by the U.S. Government and out-sourced to non-profit
and for-profit contractors.

A market trial is very much like a stock subscription agreement. You go out
and survey the market and see who is interested and if enough people or
organizations sign up, you then proceed to launch the real service. It
appears
as if there are enough .COM owners to launch a real DNS offering, using
real distributed systems, and not some central database. The real
distributed
systems are small, low-cost and able to clone themselves and back each other
up to help ensure that a .COM name can not easily disappear. There are no
disk drives or fans in the distributed nodes. They can run off of 12vDC and
be solar-powered if necessary. They have enough Registry Storage for one
.COM name and 8 other .COM Neighbors. They operate in a peer-to-peer
bit-torrent-like arrangement.

Once a .COM name is moved, there is no longer any need for a central
Registry or any of the U.S. Government contractors. The fees and taxes also
disappear. As new .COM names are added, they enter the swarming registry
of existing names, are verified to be unique and then begin to sync and swap
information to add 8 more neighbors for every name entered. Again, there is
no disk or fans. The always-on 24x7 nodes are the storage devices. If they
are powered off and recover they still have the important information and
the
credentials to prove they are authentic. Some call that Digital DNA.

The Road Ahead for .COM owners should be smooth and somewhat transparent
and should become more secure and stable. The U.S. Government really does
not
want to be in the .COM business. Even though the technology has been
possible
for a long time, the education of the marketplace has lagged because of
various
factions that conspire to hold the world back to improve their financial
position.
As the world becomes more educated, hopefully they will see that The Road
Ahead
is a better road, than the road littered with corruption from the past two
decades.
People are correct to point out that governments do a really bad job in
market trials
and other manipulations built on artificial scarcity. The .NET will route
around that
and move forward. The .COM owners will be the first to be invited, to
migrate to
a new and better DNS technology, free of the corruption that has plagued the
industry.

As for the .COM market-trials, and central registry systems, people are
advised to
pay their $60 and sign up for 10 years ($6 per year) and park their names.
It could
take 10 years to build out the new .COM infrastructure, and you would always
have
the central registry as a fall-back. Hopefully, in 10 years, you will see
that the small
low-cost distributed always-on nodes continue to run and out-perform the
central
registry. The .NET was never intended to have central single points of
failure or
political control. Your nodes that you own will form the foundation of the
.NET. In
10 years people may look back and wonder how it was ever done any other way.

If .COM appears to be progressing then .NET may follow. Unfortunately, it
appears
that .NET is headed down a different road without the .NET owner's
involvement.
That is one of the things that these proof-of-concept market trials sort
out. The .NET
TLD may eventually fade into the history books as a research project that
was phased
out. Time will tell. At the moment, it is hard to deny that .COM is the only
TLD that
has gained any real market-share in the market-trials. The U.S. Government
Department
of COMmerce certainly spent a fortune making that happen. They now want to
see their
.COM creation move to the real free and open marketplace to compete with
other TLDs
they may find there.

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