At 1/2/02 6:55 PM, Charles Daminato wrote: >Not that I'm personally defending the VeriSign proposed system >but... (read through)...
<snip> >Well, ownership isn't in question. If there is no "subscription" on the >name, it simply drops into the registry - if there is, the registration >falls to the next in line. It's like having a book or a movie on >reservation. Yeah. Again, I don't really want to defend Verisign, but the reality is that they "own" deleted .com domain names one way or another, and they're either going to sell them for $6 at random or $40 to someone with a reservation. (To paraphrase the old "joke", we've already established what they are, now we're just haggling over the price.) Since some names are more desirable, it makes sense that they should cost more. Given that Verisign is the one selling them either way, I guess I can reluctantly agree to the existence of a scheme that allows everyone involved to make more money off these names, as long as it is in fact possible for everyone in the chain to do so. However, Verisign's profit for these names increases 766% (from $6 to $46), even if every reserved name actually expires, and much more if most don't drop. Is my profit (or OpenSRS's profit) going to increase this much? I doubt it. That's why the fees seem out of line. <snip> >Since the WLS subscription is a "one ticket" system, there would be no >hammering. Once a subscription for sex.com (for example) was purchased, >no one else could get one, until the domain had expired, gone to the >subscription owner, and the subscription subsequently freed for that >domain. But subscriptions can expire if they aren't renewed, just like domains. Let's say you're a speculator and you know that someone has purchased the subscription for sex.com, and that subscription might expire at noon on January 3 (or even worse, you don't know when it might expire because the expiration date isn't public). I'd think you're going to hammer the WLS subscription availability lookup system to try to get the subscription. That doesn't seem much better than the current system; it's still a brute force method (he with the most connections wins), and SnapNames et al will simply buy extra registrar connections to the WLS system so they can grab the WLS entries by brute force. So the system will still get crushed under heavy loads, and end users will still be forced to go through SnapNames, except that SnapNames' cost increased dramatically (especially when you factor in that they had to pay for many domains that didn't drop), so they charge end-users $499 instead of $49. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
