I have received several letters from people in the travel industry indicating their support for .travel
On the great scale of things that benefit the public, I would rank the travel industry rather far below farmers, public safety workers, teachers, performing artists, and health care professionals. It seems to me that if we are going to allocate only a very few specialized new Top Level Domains then those groups have a rather stronger claim than does the travel industry.
In addition, has everyone forgotten that an arm of the travel industry already won one of the precious few new TLDs that ICANN has allocated - .aero? And can anyone articulate any specific facts about that TLD that have resulted in a cognizable benefit to the community of internet users?
I personally feel that ICANN ought to quickly and totally repudiate the Lynn doctrine and adopt something along the lines of Professor Mueller's proposal (about 40 new TLDs a year to be allocated through a modified auction process.) See http://dcc.syr.edu/miscarticles/NewTLDs-MM-LM.pdf
Under such a plan the .travel people may indeed get what they wish for. And so might the 40 others who paid a combined $2,000,000 to ICANN 30 months ago and who got ... what's the name of that fish?, ah I remember ... scrod.
Posted by karl at May 23, 2003 8:14 PM