Re: [Declude.JunkMail] Happy days are here again...

[Matthew Bramble]

Todd Holt wrote: So, ICANN comes up with a figure that is equal to the cost of maintaining the internet for a year and each registrar pays a percentage of that figure based on the percentage of all registrations that they manage? Exactly. If this is true, then… The wildcard in effect makes them customers of the registrant…by registering each of the 40,000,000,000+ domains.  This would make the total number of registered of domains increase to a staggering number.  And VeriSlime would be managing 99.999999999…% of those domains.  They would effectively pay the entire bill for running the internet!  I like it!!! J The only problem with this is that the total bill only amounts to about $3 million a year :(  But…another question… Why should we pay a fixed amount each year to the registrants if they don’t pay a fixed amount?  This sounds pretty hokey to me!  (No offense to VTech fans!)  I thought that a fixed amount of our payments were going to the internet infrastructure improvements.  Silly me!  Well, VeriSign is the one that actually maintains the majority of the registry's infrastructure for .com and .net (.org just began a transfer yesterday to a new organization).  The $6 fee that they are charging is about $5 above the initial suggested compensation at ICANN, but after a year and a half of blocking by VeriSign, even claiming ownership of the namespaces, the corporate entities at ICANN caved to their demands and set them up with this sweetheart deal...and then a year or so ago they renewed it with the only change being giving up the .org registry. It shouldn't cost that much to maintain a registry with 30 million domains ($180 million a year).  ICANN should find a replacement organization, preferably a nonprofit, to take over operations, insist that the price be dropped to $1 per domain, and use this flagrant violation as proof of breech of contract instead of waiting another 4 years or so until the current deal has expired. The only problem with all of this is that there are few organizations with the knowledge base and infrastructure that can take on a task like this.  Personally, I would vote for Tucows to take this over based on their fine character, but they would need a large cash infusion to pull it off. Matt