NSI's been screwing the pooch so long, it's surprising we're not all knee deep in puppies!
I find it amusing that large ISPs tolerate NSI for so long despite the enormous costs its incompetence imposes on their businesses. Now the bunch of self-proclaimed rule-setters called "ICANN" is going to screw them even more. I would think that these large ISPs should form the consortium and finally build a normal registry database; they already have infrastructure for customer service, and offer their customers assistance with domain registration. There is no need for independent registries. Customers wishing to register a domain should simply talk to their ISPs whose personnel can then go and update the consortium-owned database. Oh, and BTW, they _already_ have the contact info for their customers, so they do not depend on the NSI-claimed "ownership" of that information. And, unlike NSI or other registries, they can actually verify that information - and they have a pretty simple method of dealing with abusive customers. This approach scales, it can improve domain-related customer service by an order of magnitude, and it does not require any political games. Despite the cut-throat competition in the market, ISPs managed to maintain a coherent and functioning global routing infrastructure. The DNS is as essential for their customers as the actual packet transport; so i think it is time for competent people to take over it, too. Now, the question is when the ISP managers will wake up and get a clue. --vadim