Thanks for your reply, Alain.  I may have further reactions later on, but
quickly in response to one question of yours:


On Fri, September 30, 2011 6:49 am, Alain Berranger wrote:

> ... I suspect you do not hold .com
> domains
> to lose money neither, although I fully understand that making money from
> them is not a primary objective, just a necessary sustainable process I
> imagine. I do not know your activities but assume the .com domain names
> you
> use are mission-critical to the achievements of these activities. As a
> matter of curiosity, what is your rationale in going for a .com instead of
> a
> .org domain name?


In my individual case, in 1996 when I got my two related domains, I was
not sure if I was going to use them for commercial purposes or not -- I
wanted to hold out for that possibility.  Also, I registered these domains
(and continue to hold them at present) as an individual -- I am not
incorporated as a 501c3 org in the US (or any other formal incorporation).
 At the time I was under the impression that I had to be a 501c3 to apply
for .org (back then I was still a little bit of an Internet newbie, only
about 3 years into it).

As it turns out, I have not moved in a commercial direction in practice,
and my use is more often personal, not even "non-commercial" in any
institutional sense (though the "title" web site is a sort of "pre-blog"
publication of sorts).  It's more like ISP service to me, and in that
sense I do lose a bit of money, but among other things I get my own
personal email cloud service out of it without giving access to my email
data to anyone else such as Google (well, aside from email I might
exchange with gmail users...).

What may be more important to some policy considerations here (such as
WHOIS privacy) is that I use a hosting service that hosts my web site and
email accounts, not just domain hosting/registration.  So for all
real-time technical issues, that service would be the go-to technical
authority, not me/the registrant -- I would simply be an extra step in the
process to resolve technical issues, not a more direct path.  Going only
to me directly would slow things down, if I happen not to be checking my
personal email at the moment.

For non-real-time and non-technical issues, real-time response doesn't
seem as pertinent in terms of sustaining reliable Internet function, and
due process would seem to be a good thing to prioritize.

Thanks,
Dan


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