From: David Andrew Patterson [wlink@NOSPAMemunet.com.au]
Sent: Monday, 26 August 2002 4:49 PM
To: Jo Lim
Cc: acbc@catholic.org.au
Subject: Re: new 2LD proposal


I must wholeheartedly agree with concerns expressed in the "New TLDs 
Discussion Paper" that the creation of the ACBC's proposed "catholic.au" 
2LD would set a highly undesirable precedent, and also be a most 
inappropriate use of the second-level domain space, which should represent 
genric types or classes of domain registrants rather than specific 
organisations** such as a church.

As an alternative, I would suggest that the Catholic organisations proposed 
for eligibility would be just as efficiently served by a Church-controlled 
third-level subdomain within a more generic 2LD for churches or religions 
in general. In the interests of both brevity and clarity, I would suggest 
rc.rlg.au: rlg being a fairly commonsense abbreviation for "religion" or 
"religious", and "rc", in context, clearly indicating Roman Catholic.

Other organisations could then make the same use of the .rlg.au namespace 
through subdomains such as ce.rlg.au (or ang.rel.au), utg.rel.au, 
jew.rlg.au, etcetera. This of course, still leaves room for debate over 
just what constitutes a "religion". Decisions as to whether a particular 
organisation qualifies for a .rlg.au subdomain would of course need to be 
completely impartial, whether made by AUDA itself (in the case of an "open" 
.rlg.au 2LD) or a specialised body of some kind (for a "closed" .rlg.au). 
The latter may well be desirable in the interests of specialised expertise 
and de-centralisation, but the body responsible **must** itself be 
religiously impartial.

**To anyone who may raise the existence of csiro.au as an example of such a 
precedent already set - let's break with it now!!! Csiro.au, in my opinion, 
always should have been csiro.gov.au, for the same reasons above.





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David Andrew Patterson
wlink@NOSPAMemunet.com.au
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