...

the primary beneficiaries of this new functionality are spammers and other malfeasants

... The primary beneficiaries are all ^ intended current and future .com/.net domain holders:

I'm not talking about intended beneficiaries. I agree with your statement when applied to intended beneficiaries. I'm talking about the character of the preponderance of actual beneficiaries, whether measured by number of domain registration events per unit time, or number of dollars of income enabled by the speediness of the "fast update" VeriSign is now announcing.

... I also stated in that message that VeriSign has no intention of changing the current 48-hour TTL on delegation NS RRsets in .com/.net.

Right. And I hope you are able to stick to that plan in the face of what I think will be gigantic pressure, from both registrants and competitors, to lower it.

I agree with Daniel's earlier statement that this is an education issue. Does anyone want to co-author an Internet-Draft on the topic of choosing appropriate TTLs?

I can't think of anyone who could do it better than you could, Matt. I know I offered to help a while back, but we never really got started on it, and after being named as a "sitefinder co-conspirator" in your lawsuit against ICANN, I think I'll hold off on co-authoring anything with any VeriSign employee for the time being.