Once again, we have a tempest in a teapot. And once again this "tempest" is just a means of obscuring the real problem. Speculators aren't the problem. They are just a scapegoat. I'm probably going about this the wrong way by arguing the details of speculation, instead of getting people to focus on the real problems of performance and management. But Internic isn't very forthcoming in how they manage their systems. Even so, I think I could run an automated database service for very little cost per transaction. On the order of hundreths of a cent per transaction. Charging $35 means means that one can make many, many thousands of non-revenue transactions per revenue generating transaction. So I'll make the claim that if Internic can't do it for a comparable cost, that isn't justification for restrictions on the user community. You all remember when Internic was formed, and registrations were going to cost money, that many people thought $50.00 a year was outrageously high, right? At 01:55 PM 1/20/1999 -0700, Pete Kruckenberg wrote:
There is a key difference, and that is that stock speculators pay for the right to speculate, so the system can afford to scale to meet the increased volume.
Actually, quite a few stock speculators don't pay for the privilege. Many speculators are stock brokers or floor traders who speculate cost free (other than the cost of the stocks they buy). And you should note that now that the stock exchanges are now nearly fully automated (though much less so than Internic), discount brokerages now charge less than Internic. Trading never stops now. Again, I think a first class, high availability, high security database service can be operated without significant per transaction costs. Indeed, it is a damning indictment of Internic that stock brokerages charge less, yet provide more secure, and more highly available computer services. You also assume that domain speculators are the only ones who register more domains than they pay for. They aren't. I'll bet many here have registered domains that they later didn't want and didn't pay for. Further, speculators ultimately pay for the domains they sell. What you are really complaining about is that they register some domains they don't pay for. The only reason you are complaining about that is because someone pinned the blame for Internic problems on speculators. The claim that "speculators don't pay" doesn't stand up. Neither does the claim that speculators cause Internic problems. They don't. I think Internic can afford to scale with the volume regardless of speculation. Internic is a nearly fully automated process which charges 35.00 for a completed registration. I am going to go out on a limb that a single database transaction costs very nearly nothing. So without doing the math for a single registration, I think Internic *afford* a large number of non-completed transactions for each completed transaction. Speculators that actively try to sell their domains quite likely cause more domains to be registered, and so they increase the Internic sales revenue. I haven't seen any evidence that the costs of their non-completed transactions are more than cost of their completed transactions. It costs them much more to fill out the registration template and scan the news than it does for Internic to (automatically) process the registration. If they don't sell more than their time is worth, they won't be able to afford to keep doing it. So it doesn't make any sense that they register to many hundreds of thousands of domains per successful registration. And if they generate a net-gain for Internic, thats a good thing. The only speculators that might be able to register thousands of domains with little effort are the ones who register on-hold domains. But they are doing a favor for Internic, because they are collecting fees. More importantly, they will ultimately encourage people to make their payments on time. Thats a good thing for Internic. Quite possibly, Internic can improve its efficiency with regard to domain expirations and re-registrations. But that doesn't mean that one should go though contortions to stop speculators. I certainly don't want to give up the current system that allows one to register domains with delayed or canceled payment and immediate duplicate notification. --Dean ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Plain Aviation, Inc dean@av8.com LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP http://www.av8.com ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++