Re: Johnson, Farber, Maher and Cochetti

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Thu, 21 May 1998 19:17:23 BST, Jeff Williams said:
>   Why?  If they are paying for those domains and they represent a spicific
> stake (Hence the term Stakeholder), they may have a proportionate input
> to the process.

OK. Assume that there are about 1 million .COM addresses now allocated.
Assume the $50/year charge in effect.  Thus, for an investment of $51M,
a corporation fronted by cronies of Bill Gates can buy the internet,
after registering AAA0.COM, AAA1.COM, and so on up to 9999.COM (assuming
26 letters, 10 digits, and the hyphen, 37**4 is 1,874,161, which covers
the fraction you lose on leading hyphens).

The *REAL* problem is that there's more than one company that would be
willing to invest $50M to essentially get a stranglehold on the
Internet.  Compute the impact on the Internet if 5 companies each tried
to do this.  Consider effects on the .COM registry and the .COM
nameservers.

What the Hunt brothers did to the silver market should be a warning lesson.

				Valdis Kletnieks
				Computer Systems Senior Engineer
				Virginia Tech