If they had done it privately, before users started experiencing the dislocation, I would have been happy to provide the feedback privately. In the discussion last week, Netscape said that it's a beta process at work. They can change things while the software is being evaluated. It's a fairly technical area, but it may have broad economic impact. I predict this will be one of the hottest discussions for the remainder of 1998, among all industry elements, especially people who hold stock in companies with generic domain names.
Public betas can cause shifts in economics.
They have to be as carefully thought out as full version product releases were in the past. Let's see fewer public trial balloons. Discuss it privately with friends before unleashing poorly thought out ideas in public. Further, I remember hearing that Netscape was committed to the open standards process. So some things have to remain private.