I spent some more time with the .geo proposal. I found more things that just don't make sense … yet. The proposal suggests that many organizations will benefit from the new domain. They even list them: USGS, NASA, EPA, Geomatics Canada, UNESCO, UNCTAD, ESA, Open GIS Consortium (OGC), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum, World Board Forum, International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Petrotechnical Open Software Corporation (POSC), Joint Steering Group on Spatial Standardization and Related Interoperability. These are exactly the groups I want to see speaking out - for or against - this initiative. But I don't see anything.

So, I started to ask these organizations what they'd heard about .geo. This week I received one stock answer from USGS: "The USGS is an agency of the United States Federal Government. In keeping with its role as an impartial scientific agency, the USGS maintains a policy of neither criticizing nor endorsing other organizations, their web sites, or their publications." I'm a bit disappointed that the organization that I pay my taxes to fund has nothing to say about an initiative that would change mapping and the web forever. The ISO (International Standards Organization) was checking to see if they had been contacted. The note from UNCTAD pointed out that one of the support comments noted on the dotgeo discussion area was clearly marked to indicate it represented only the author, not the organization.

Further down in my close reading, I noted that SRI had already contracted a registry operator: JVTeam, LLC. And, they had a proposed contract with them, already written. JVTeam was still changing its name on Sept 29 of this year. JVTeam is a newly registered company, a Joint Venture (JV, get it?) of Neustar, Washington DC and Melbourne IT of Australia. Melbourne IT (1996) is in the Internet domain name registry game: they are the administrator of the .com.au domains. Melbourne IT has several formal alliances with Verio Inc., Ericsson Australia Pty. Ltd., i-DNS.net International, Digital Envoy Inc., and eSign.

Neustar (1998) is owned by four companies: Warburg Pincus Equity Partners and affiliates (68%), Lockheed Martin Corporation (4%), Universal Telecommunications, Inc., (3%) and NeuStar management (25%).

Neustar was started as a business unit within Lockheed Martin. NeuStar designed, built, and manages one of the largest databases in the world and now serves as the North American Numbering Plan Administrator (NANPA). It operates the telephone numbering registry for the North American Numbering Plan as a public numbering resource. NeuStar is also the Local Number Portability Administrator (LNPA) for the U.S. and Canada, operating the routing registry, the Number Portability Administration Center Service Management System (NPAC SMS) for North America. Does it make sense for the same people who manage "all phone numbers" to manage "all geography?"

Next, I took a deeper look at the marketing section of the proposal. The proposal notes current directories and search engines cannot keep up with new pages. No argument there. "Directory and search engine providers can make their services more complete, less biased, and easier to use by incorporating .geo." How is .geo less biased? Results will still be listed with some higher and some lower. How can it be more complete since any site/page/movie/3D rendered scene, that is not registered, cannot be searched spatially?

The marketing section also provides user scenarios in different use arenas. On GIS: ".geo also will make existing GIS technology more powerful by enabling conventional GIS systems to access information that now is not available in proprietary GIS formats." I think the idea here is that geospatial metadata is currently not stored by most GISs. That is true, but changing. Still, those holding the data would have to actively register it in order for anyone to access it. Finally, "We expect the GIS industry to embrace .geo." I do not understand why SRI is not SURE that the GIS industry will embrace it. Wouldn't SRI want all the big players on board already?

And, finally, I'm trying to figure out how SRI will convince "end-users" that is data providers, to register their data. One of the user scenarios describes an oil company looking for information on the likelihood of an oil deposit in a particular sub-sea location. .geo turns up: "a 16th-Century report by the captain of a Spanish galleon, quoted in a thesis published online, describing a welling-up of tar" from beneath the waves." Perhaps. But who spent the time to read the thesis, then register this information? And who paid for it? 
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