Hi all, On the 7th of next month I'll be participating in an ICANN consultation on the proposed draft registry agreement, and the number of "nines" that have crept into it, relative to what was expected of new registry operators a decade ago, is one of the hidden cost increases I will discuss with ICANN's lawyers, who are responsible for the extra nines. I'm looking for sources of cost-per-nine, network provisioning, and host provisioning, where "host" is usually a bunch of boxen, not just a pizza box. The way the requirements are now, a startup of another .museum, say for libraries or archives, or a new .coop, or a new linguistic and cultural say a .scot, has to provide a higher level of performance than Verisign currently does for com/net/name, which is slightly absurd, if not worse. I can cite sources, or not, as preferred, and while CORE is comfortable at any number ICANN's lawyers can come up with under the theory that "more nines is what security and stability mean", my goal is to allow real startups, like .museum and .coop were in 2001, not be forced to outsource registry operations to an already highly capitalized registry service provider, for competition policy reasons. I'm also "in the market" for recent failure data, such as Ultra's yesterday, and Verisign's v6, not for competitive reasons, but to show that the SLA expectation of ICANN's lawyers may need modification if placed proximal to actual operational failure data. Off-list or on, and thanks in advance, from my Yule tree to your own. Cheers, Eric