On Sun, 15 Oct 2000, Roger Smith wrote:

> Thankyou for this posting.  What I (and others) may not have been aware of
> is that Cary's sector interest committee are trying to tie up not only
> .museum domains but also
>
> .mus,
> .muse,
> .musea
> .museums


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Roger:

I am getting tired with the misunderstandings and misinformation that are
being circulated about this!!

The simple facts are that:

(1) very many new top level domains are about to be created as e-mail and
    web addressing moves from specialist directories and search engines to
    towards intuitive, plain language ones, that non-specialist have a
    good chance of guessing;

(2) with - according to the latest web directory search that I've done -
    already more than 6 million museum or museum-relayed web pages, it is
    obvious that either now or sometime in the next couple of years a
    "museum" domain of some kind WILL be allocated. (This has been ICOM
    policy for getting on for 5 years, discussed at Advisory Committee
    and other meetings on several occasions.)

The choice is therefore equally simple:

(1) do we press for a non-profit domain management body to run this?

OR

(2) do we sit back and let some new or existing commercial organisation
    run it without any "quality control" or validation and charge museums
    whatever they like?

In relation to the second option the Pacific "micro-state" of Tuvalu's
recent decision to virtually "sell" (on a royalty basis) it's highly
desirable ".tv" national domain to a commercial contractor ought to be an
awful warning.  An enterprising Korean businessman who had previously
registered "sports.tv" with the national authorities has apparently been
told bluntly that "this was a mistake" and that the registration has been
cancelled.  However, he is going to be "allowed" to make a competitive bid
to reclaim his own address - but the starting price in the bidding will be
in millions of US dollars.

Whilst the World Intellectual Property Organisation's measures against
"cyber-squatting" would probably protected addresses using well
established "brands" such as getty.museum or british.museum, it is very
easy to envisage a commercial operation running a .museum (or whatever
the final name is) domain running an auction for other desirable addresses
- e.g. $250,000 minimum bid for "www.the-worlds-best.museum", $100,000 for
"national.museum" and "national.gallery" and - say - $50,000, Roger, for
"global.museum"!!

The dangers of leaving the necessary quality control or regulation to
an outside body without access to the necessary information is well
illustrated by the embarrassment (or worse) of the British Customs &
Excise a few years ago.  It took three years and a very embarrassing
criminal trial to find out that Customs had granted a notorious importer of
child and bestiality pornography museum status (as the innocent sounding
"Robin Hood Museum"!) for the purposes of exemption from normal Customs
inspection all of his imports.



Patrick Boylan

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