At 8/28/01 7:31 PM, Cameron Powell wrote:
>b) The way we have remained a viable company is by, among other things, (1)
>never abusing the Registry, (2) never, in 9 months of operation, even
>receiving a warning or any other negative comment from the Registry on our
>methods, notwithstanding very frequent contact we have with them. How do we
>avoid abuse? We always stay within the number of connections allowed. When
>our understanding was that there was an unwritten rule of 250 connections
>per registrar, we stayed at 250, even when some others were grabbing
>multiples of that (see June 11, 2001). When the Registry lowered the number
>to 200, we stayed below 200. And now at 50, we help each of our registrar
>partners run technology employing 50 connections. No matter what the
>maximum number is, our consortium of registrars will always have more than
>any registrar acting alone. This volumetric superiority does in fact scale,
>because our volume is always greater and it's always, by definition, within
>the Registry's guidelines at the same time. This will still be true even if
>more solo registrars try to get involved and the Registry feels it must
>lower the maximum number of threads for batch-processing to below 50.
>
>At least as importantly, no one uses their resources as efficiently as our
>partners. All other registrars who attempt to play this game solo do so on
>behalf of a few high-paying customers. It has not been concealed from us or
>our partners that ICANN and the Registry prefer our method of serving the
>maximum number of customers, democratically, per connection, rather than
>those who use the public good that is ICANN-granted connections to the
>Registry to serve a few (speculators).
Forgive me for asking the obvious, but if the "ICANN-granted connections
to the Registry" are indeed a public resource, and are in extremely
limited supply, why should SnapNames get 50 of them (and not, for
example, me)?
After all, if everyone tried getting 50 connections simultaneously, we'd
be in trouble. I'm sure if I used 50 connections TUCOWS would cut me off.
I suspect the answer is that you get the connections because you're
paying registrars a premium for them (with venture capital money). That's
fine, except that this noble talk of using connections democratically
falls a little flat. It may be democratic from the point of view of your
customers, but it isn't democratic from my point of view, since your 50
full-time connections per registrar pretty much obliterate any chance I,
as a single reseller, have of getting the same name for my customer.
You're basically saying "we have a lot to offer you because we have the
money to buy more connections than you do".
Anyway, philosophical objections aside, I do have a practical question.
--
Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
