An alternate interpretation might be that 17% (or some portion thereof) of the domains in .COM are held by domain speculators who have no intention of paying for them and can't be bothered to provide DNS for them.
And a third alternative would be domainholders who have registered and paid for domain names which they intend to use in the future but have not gotten around to setting up websites on them yet.
I'm posting here because I feel it is an operational issue; that, plus I feel there're more folks here who can and will hammer at InterNIC to start doing something to enforce their policies that require real, authoritative nameservers.
Internic's Domain Dispute Resolution Policy, Rev 2 [1], required two operational nameservers; in Rev 3 [2], they've dropped that requirement. They're still listing it in the FAQ [3], tho. It seems unclear whether they intend it to be a policy or not... Lisa 1: http://rs.internic.net/domain-info/nic-rev02.html 2: http://rs.internic.net/domain-info/nic-rev03.html 3: http://rs.internic.net/faq/name_servers.html Lisa Lorenzin Webmaster / System Administrator TriNet Services, Inc. lisa@trinet.com