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[Jeff Taylor <shdwdrgn AT sourpuss.net>]

Wow I didn't realize this discussion had blown up today!  I just got 
caught up, so let me see what I can answer...

First and foremost... I think it would be a great idea to bring this up 
with Amazon and see if they have any interest in playing nicely with 
others, especially as it was suggested that they intend to give domains 
out for free, so there's a chance they may be willing to accept our 
currently registered domains into their pool (and you can bet it has to 
go that way, they won't be interested in letting us continue to manage 
domains for the TLD).  I think that would be the best we could hope 
for.  With that said, I don't have the time nor energy to get into this 
fight, and I wouldn't know where to begin. If someone wants to collect 
the information and contacts, including any possibility of a precedence, 
I could probably draft the emails to be sent to Amazon to try and get 
the ball rolling, but I can't guarantee much else.  If for some reason 
Amazon does agree to accept our currently registered domains into their 
zone, it would set a strong precedence for the future that could be used 
for more difficult cases.

Also I didn't think of this last night, but as of now I have disabled 
registering any new domains under .free until we get this sorted.  If 
you find you are unable to renew any existing domains that are about to 
expire, please send me a private email and I'll get it fixed.

Just to clarify, if we decide to keep our zone then we would drop 
ICANN's zone completely.  This is actually what is happening now, if you 
look at the opennic root zone, you will see no mention of the ICANN 
zone.  Therefore there would be no issue in dealing with collisions -- 
it's an all or nothing thing, opennic either supports one zone or the 
other but not both.

If we decide to move our existing domains to a new TLD, it would carry 
the same policy as the existing .free.  To be perfectly honest, I don't 
even know what that policy is.  However as with previous collisions, the 
voting process would be much more streamlined.  The policy has already 
been previously approved, so if we decide to transfer to a new TLD then 
the only thing we need to vote on is what exactly that new TLD will be 
called (I vote for .beer), and how much time we want to give the domain 
owners before we cut all support for opennic's .free.  The transition 
itself would be mostly painless... I can dump the existing domain 
information into a new zone file in just a few minutes, and I could add 
a temporary policy to reg.for.free to maintain a mirror of the domain 
information between both TLDs during the transition period.  On the 
technical side of things, a migration would be very easy.  The real 
issue will be in the update of all the web pages and the servers 
supporting the existing domains, and that's why we need a clear period 
of time to perform the transition.

Personally I don't feel like option #1 is really an option we should 
pursue.  Users won't be as interested in opennic if we don't fully 
support the whole internet.  Since we do have a large number of existing 
domains under .free, option #3 is just a bad move and destroys people's 
faith in the project.  When the .ing zone was dropped last year, I 
supported that because despite having a huge number of registered zones, 
almost none of them were actually active (keep in mind that .free and 
.geek EACH had over 5000 registered domains when I took over, but once I 
called for active domain renewals we found that most of those had been 
abandoned).  The only way that #3 makes sense is if, like I said above, 
Amazon is willing to absorb our existing domains into their pool.  Which 
leaves us with option #2.  Obviously there has been a lot of support for 
.free over the years, and if there is no way to reconcile with Amazon, 
then I feel like this would be the only path that opennic can take, and 
we should be prepared for this as the most likely outcome.