Ok, I thought I would stay out of this. It must be off topic. "Pay-First" isn't a simple solution. I'll explain why. First, what do speculators do? They register a domain and watch the news for companies or products that might be able to use the domain. If they find such a target company, they pay for the domain and try to sell it to the target. If not, they let the payment slip. Perhaps in 30 days, they re-register the domain if it still looks attractive. Second, the current system evolved because of the requirements to reject duplicates, and immediately notify the registrant about a duplicate and allow registrations to go forward before "the check clears". Duplicates might come in seconds after the first registation. Thing are done on the "internet" time scale vs. the "telco" time scale. Third, the idea that it only takes minutes or a few days to process a payment is wrong. It takes up to eleven business days to clear a check. A week to mail, and a week to process is not unreasonable, which quickly adds up to about 30 days. Credit card payments can take 60 days to clear, since they can be refuted when it appears on your bill. So, with that in mind lets look at what it would take to implement the "pay first" idea. To make sure that payment is received, all registrations would have to wait until the check cleared, or the credit card charge wasn't refuted. That means you might wait 30 to 60 days for the registation. That would be unacceptable. No one wants to wait until the check clears. Also note that this restriction doesn't affect speculation at all. Speculators don't care if the domain can't be registered for 30 days. They want 30 days to decide whether to keep it or not. But what net user wants to wait 30 days for a registration? Probably very few. Ok, so we rule that out. Lets say we modify that a bit, and give the first registrant the domain right away, and then if payment doesn't clear in 30 days, you revoke it. The second registrant is notified immediately of a conflict. (You might recognize this as the current system) This delay can be used by speculators to speculate on useful domains. So we aren't quite happy with this. Lets modify this a bit further, and say we keep a queue of registrants. If the first registrant doesn't pay, it goes to the second registrant. Now the second registrant would have to wait 30 days to know whether they get the domain or not. In that time, they probably would change their mind and select a new name which can be registered right away. So they might not want it in 30 days. The third registrant would have to wait 60 days. Now NSI has the expensive logistical overhead of keeping track of this queue for each registration. Have speculators been limited? No. Speculators can still form chains of organizations to make multiple registrations of the same domain. This would work very well unless someone got in the middle of this chain. This is probably even better for speculators, since now they can "reserve" a domain for as long as they want, merely be creating a chain of companies to register the domain many times. Lawyers are good a creating a chain of companies. So, is it possible to have immediate notification of duplications, registration before payment completes, and still reject speculation? It doesn't appear so. I'll go on record here that in my opinion, speculation is a unavoidable "feature" of the system, which may be somewhat undesirable but one that cannot be removed. The reason it cannot be removed is because of the delay involved in completing the financial transaction, and the possibility that such transactions can be terminated. We can't change the banking system to prevent domainname speculation. Further, there are legit activities the look very much like speculation. I don't know how many of you have been involved with startups, but I have advised a few. Its a very hectic time as the principals try to select and register a name. Figure out trademark conflicts, etc. Often the business idea, image, and focus change greatly during this initial period. They typical register a dozen domains or more. Some are rejected. Others they get. Once they select one that they got, they usually don't want the others. My point is that there is a lot of legitimate "register, cancel-no pay" activities. It is precisely these same activities that speculators use for speculation. While speculation may produce some additional load on NSI, there was also a time when people only bought and sold stock with the intention of buying or selling a company, rather than speculating about its future stock value. So speculators produce tremendous load on stock exchanges. However, in doing so, they now provide much of the capital to finance business. I don't expect domain speculators to become the equivalent of stock speculators, but they really aren't any different from speculators in land, bonds, currency, grain, or anything else. They are part of the market system. Speculators in other areas don't enjoy the gratitude of the "regular users" of those areas either. Farmers generally hate land speculators. But they realize they have to live with that. So I think the solution is to build a system that scales well to millions of transactions per day, regardless of the ultimate purpose for those registrations. The per transaction cost becomes trivial, and the cost of speculation is likewise minimized. --Dean ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Plain Aviation, Inc dean@av8.com LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP http://www.av8.com ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++