Exactly how much can it cost to serve up those requests... I mean for 9$ a month I have a cpu that handles 2000 *Recursive* Queries a second. 900 bux could net me *200,000* a second if not more. The government overspends on a lot of things.. they need some one whos got the experience to use a bunch of cheap servers for the resolvers and a box that hosts the IPs used and then distributes the query packets.
For $50/mo I can have a connection from Comcast. That doesn't mean that I could run my own cable to the nearest major exchange for anywhere near
$50.
Also, what's the failover if your $9/mo CPU develops a bad RAM card? Does your $9/mo CPU have sufficient geographic diversity to survive a backhoe? And about 4 zillion other things that people that actually have to run
production
services worry about...
Why should the taxpayers pay for geographic diversity or any of those 4 zillion other things required to keep these DNS servers up so infected computers can continue to reach the Internet? I don't really mind paying $9/300 millionths per month to help folks make a smooth transition back to proper DNS, but I wouldn't want to pay much more. The FBI should have just pulled the plug and let the folks who can't connect inundate their ISPs with support calls, which might encourage the ISPs to be a little more proactive about shutting down the botnets they host.