Aristedes Maniatis wrote:

> 2- Even lower supply to meet the demand. At the moment, just having both
> net.au and com.au almost doubles the amount of space available to
> businesses. net.au is being used more and more by non-networking businesses.
>
> I would actually advocate in the opposite direction. The current high US

So would I.

How about a set of domain names like x.cars.com.au, to which anyone who wants to
flog cars or car-related stuff can belong.  Someone could even maintain some
indexes at www.cars.com.au.  Perhaps generic names could be given to anyone, eg a
trade association or interested individual, who is willing to maintain such a
page.  And hey, why not give them a couple of bucks out of our current outrageous
registration fees for maintaining the index.  The condition that the generic
index shouldn't favour owner or incumbents should apply.

At the moment there is an absurdly skewed supply/demand situation in domain names
leading to a variety of on-going crazy scenarios and gripes.  My (initial) take
on this situation is to give a 2ld to anyone who was willing to support it as a
genuinely non-proprietary shared resource (with reasonable fees).   If we had 200
or 2000 .au second level domains (com, net,org, edu, biz, buy, co, shop, place,
cars, game, blue, red, fish, name, clan, group, wombat, school, jump, etc) then a
lot more people could get something closer to what they really want.  And if they
couldn't get it, and really wanted it, they could start their own 2ld.  That'd
pull a few rugs!

And wouldn't that cut down the flux de mots on this list...

Regards

Jim Birch