At 8/30/01 4:20 PM, Cameron Powell wrote:
>In my limited opinion, it's not registrars or resellers who ultimately have
>rights to connections/names, but customers.
True.
>Accordingly, registrars and
>resellers who can attract the customers should get the connections to serve
>them.
However, given that there are only a few hundred connections available,
and that resellers/customers want to do tens of millions of lookups,
there clearly aren't enough connections to go around (and probably will
never be, because many customers would happily grab multiple connections
if they were available).
Given that, if we follow your "more customers, more connections" logic,
it means a few big players will get all the connections, and the rest of
us will get none. As long as the best method for registering expiring
domains is to just try it repeatedly as many times as you can get away
with, the problem will persist.
There *are* methods other than fight-to-the-death hammering that could
work. For example, the reason people aren't hammering the SnapNames Web
site during registry drop periods is that SnapNames has already reserved
the slot for a single person at some point in the past: the load is
spread out by taking reservations. (Although I'd be interested to know if
people try to hammer you in the hope they'll be able to get the SnapNames
slot when someone drops it...!)
As suggested here, the registry could do a similar thing: allow
registrars to reserve back-ordered domains on a first-come, first serve
basis, then award a dropped domain to a random registrar.
There's no reason SnapNames couldn't be part of such a system, reselling
the reservations -- and probably still dominating the system by good
marketing. That wouldn't bother me; it would in fact remove the nagging
suspicion that there's an incentive for SnapNames, and similar services,
to attempt to dominate the market by acting in a monopolistic manner
towards the limited pool of registry connections.
(Note that I'm not necessarily saying SnapNames acts this way: just that
as long as any one company is doing so, there's an incentive for others
to act in the same fashion. If, in fact, SnapNames does limit themselves,
I'd think they'd welcome a system that limits other bad guys.)
This is all hypothetical, of course. I suspect I'll be complaining about
the same problem in 2005.
--
Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
