[OpenID] why is xri so obtuse?

[Drummond Reed]

>-----Original Message-----
From: Dmitry Shechtman [mailto:damnian at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, January 01, 2007 4:19 PM
To: 'Steve Churchill'; 'Drummond Reed'; general at openid.net
Subject: RE: [OpenID] why is xri so obtuse?
>
>I see. So this is essentially the same as owning a (sub)domain.
>
>If I don't want to spend money on registering a domain, I can just get a
>freedomain.com subdomain, such as dmitry.freedomain.com and then host any
>number of directories under that, such as dmitry.freedomain.com/friends/
>etc.
>
>That is, until my subdomain becomes popular. Then, all of the sudden the
>domain owner will deny service, unless I pay. Naturally, the price would
>ultimately be higher than what it would have been had I registered a domain
>in the first place.
>
>Did I just oversimplify the concept of "free i-names"?

Dmitry, your observations apply equally to both DNS names and XRI
i-names/i-numbers. In other words, the benefits and tradeoffs of using
either delegated DNS domain names or delegated XRI i-names/i-numbers are the
same: they will typically be free, but they are not portable in the way a
global identifier is portable, and they always subject to the control of the
authority for the global identifier.

So "free community i-names" differ from "free third-level domain names" only
in the other aspects of XRI infrastructure that differ from DNS
infrastructure. On that I'm still working on my original reply to this
thread...

=Drummond