> My suggestion to ISI at this point would be to distinguish between
> "community" registrars and "commercial" registrars. A community registrar
> must have a reasonable relation to the place for which it's a registry,
> e.g. live or have an office within 20 miles of it, and handle registrations
> at no charge. Commercial registries have no such restrictions. In case of
> conflicting requests between community and commercial registrars, the
> community registrar wins.
>
This seems like the seed of a great idea, although the 20-mile
restriction may be too tight.
I'm thinking specifically of a regional ISP from the NSFNet days
which...
- Provided US domain registration services in a very professional
manner for roughly an entire state.
- Never charged for registration (still doesn't as far as I know)
- Did a lot to promote use of the US domain within its region
On a related note, last year ISI, evidently in response to the
problem you describe, announced that US subregistries would be
limited to 50 delegations apiece. I don't know if this limit was
applied retroactively to subregistries that were already handling a
larger number of subdomains or not.
