Second level domains for individuals

    Date:        Fri, 10 Nov 1995 09:46:46 +0100
    From:        Daniel Karrenberg <Daniel.Karrenberg at ripe.net>
    Message-ID:  <9511100846.AA11630 at ncc.ripe.net>


    1) Do not register individuals.  This is only temporary relief but it
    may last a few years.

That doesn't work either, the individuals just pretend to
be businesses.
    
    2) Register individuals in geographic subdomains, approaching postal
    addresses.

This would work if you could convince the people that the
domain registration just says something about how they
registered, and nothing about them as they exist.  While
this is certainly true, technically, in people's minds it
isn't, they seem to believe that if their domain name is
foo.melb.vic.au and they move to Sydney they have to change
domain names.   That's not a good impression to leave (apart
from causing them to unnecessarily change their domain name,
it also adds to registry work for no particular good purpose).
    
    3) Register individuals in arbitrary subdomains.  One scheme proposed
    was something like

    Robert Elz <kre at munnari.OZ.AU> wrote a quite elaborate proposal for
    something like this back in Oct 94.  I do not know the extent to which
    it has been a success but people might want to look at the id.au domain.

Its actually still just starting.  That's mostly due to my
laziness (or how busy I am, or however you like to phrase it).
That is, at each step along the way of setting it up, I
inserted an arbitrary delay of about 4-5 months...   It is
mostly running now though, and seems OK, though as yet we have
not a lot of registrations.    For those who don't know of it,
the arbitrary string in our case is currently a label that refers
to some Australian flora or fauna - however we can use anything
as the need arises.   For us, one level is enough, we're pretty
sure that 10000 entries in a domain is manageable, that means
we could have 10000 domains each with 10000 individuals, which
is, I think 100 million, which is just plenty for Australia
for a very long time.

    My personal opinion is

    1) Never register individuals under a TLD. 

I agree totally - in fact, my personal opinion is to only
register (large) classes in a TLD, that is, all end user
domains are at least 3 levels.   I know that many Eurpoean
contry registries don't agree however.

kre