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 -- Any opinions expressed in this message are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect any position of the author's employer.