Discuss mailing list

[Jeff Taylor <shdwdrgn AT sourpuss.net>]

Well damn...  The threat of .free being used by ICANN has been out there 
for a few years, almost since they opened up their gTLDs, but the 
application has always fallen through or been dropped. Unfortunately I 
see that as of November 7th Amazon successfully registered the TLD, and 
it is in fact resolving from ICANN now.

So we need to discuss the matter, and determine how Opennic wants to 
proceed.  For reference there are 157 active domains registered under 
.free (around 8 of those are system domains like www.free).

-- We can choose to ignore ICANN and continue using .free as an opennic TLD
-- We can move the existing opennic domains to a new TLD and support 
ICANN's .free
-- We can drop all opennic domains and support ICANN's .free

Although it is possible to merge the records from both sources, it is a 
labor-intensive pain in the butt and we would have to consider every 
domain name that conflicts now and in the future... This is not an 
option I feel is worthwhile.  Thus, the three options above are really 
the only choices we have.  There has been some discussion about 
migrating .free to a new .libre TLD under opennic, and if enough people 
are interested in migrating then I would take suggestions and a vote for 
the new TLD name.  If we want to choose option 1 above, then we do 
nothing and continue to ignore ICANN's TLD.  If we want option 3, then I 
simply remove .free from opennic, and the ICANN domains will start 
resolving.