hey, a content free rant fest. "these are a few of my favorite things..."
Seems to me that somebody has to pay for the service and I'd rather pay for it myself rather than have the U.S. taxpayer foot the bill.
Indeed. When you let a taxpayer buy something for you, then the so-called representatives of that taxpayer get to make decisions about the service, and sometimes those decisions have a lot of social engineering built in. Far better to get something done without this kind of government value-add.
So start paying the operators of the root nameservers for their services. I find the root nameservers to be vastly more useful than where my money appears to be going.
Network Solutions paid for the hardware I now run F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET on. I reached a certain point where I could not afford to buy the next 512MB of RAM out of ISC funds. So from my point of view, domain holders who send money to Network Solutions are doing the right thing, no matter what the original contract may have said.
Inferencing the US govt. is out of the loop is a logical leap of faith. Tell me who owns the "." and why wouldn't the Feds of some denomination step in to "stabilize" the namespace.
They will try, but since it's not a defense issue noone will take them seriously.
In other words, why would they risk such a valuable resource, built in the past with US taxpayer money, walk away to a potentially non-US private enterprise or a consortium.
They can and would do this with .MIL and .GOV, but the others don't point at any resources that they own, and point at many resources owned by citizens of countries where treaties are in effect. They will at some point take over .US, but the process of government intervention in the affairs of "." will take every bit as long as the one which led to the international allocation of radio frequency spectrums.
$50/year is outrageous and does reflect monopolistic pricing.
if i had to do it, i'd end up burning $25 of it on the accounts receivable process and the other $25 of it on legal fees and end up with nothing. so, as a root name server operator, i am happy as hell not to be in this loop.
If you think $50 is bad, just wait and see if the $20,000/year/domain goes through...
i havn't heard that one. i think you're confused about top level domains vs. second level domains.