Miles Fidelman wrote:
Just out of curiousity, I wonder how many domain registrations those of us on nanog represent? Contract sanctions from ICANN are one thing, taking all of our business elsewhere might also be effective at getting a point across (though it might also backfire - pushing Verisign to be even more agressive at taking advantage of their positioning).
I get the impression they are still living under the old Bell Motto: We don't have to care, we're The Registrar. A couple years ago when their monopoly was broken, I used it as a threat to try to finally get a report of all the domains on our nameservers. For years I would send requests every couple months, and each and every one was ignored. I sent Verisign a list of ~1000 domains I knew were pointed to us, and said "Can you confirm these are the only ones? If I don't get an answer, I'm moving them all to another registrar." I never got an answer. The final straw that sent us to OpenSRS was the creation of ~1000 unique accounts for us to use to manage those domains, when the old e-mail method went away.... Of course, the passwords were all snail-mailed to our clients, effectively taking away control of those domains from us. Verisign obviously doesn't want the Registrar business, or they would have found out a way to combine all those accounts when we asked. We figure that a company so clueless doesn't deserve our certificate business either, and are pretty happy with GeoTrust.