> It should be taken over by a non-profit organization like the
> CIRA in Canada. Revenue made should be to just cover the
> cost of running and maintaining the service efficiently.
I remember the days when domains were free.
The cost of running and maintaining the service efficiently,
provided that was your goal and you're competent at it,
is probably not more than $0.015 per domain (about $450,000
a year assuming 30 million .com domain registrations).
Even less if you can pawn off some of the TLD name servers
to organizations (IBM, Sun, HP, etc) that would host one
for good will and advertising value, and/or universities (much
like the root servers are (or were?) distributed).
And if the registry were allowed to run a SiteFinder like service,
they could drop the cost to ZERO and recoup significantly
more than their expenses selling ads on that.
The problem with this, is that at zero (or nominal) wholesale
cost, a registrar could hoard an enormous number of domains.
Domains need to be priced high enough to nominally protect a
scarce resource by assigning a cost to domain hoarding, while
low enough not to be profiteering on a public resource.
However, if a non-profit runs it (and I believe a non-profit ought
to), excess profits can be used to pay for many things (as grants
or whatever). Unfortunately that will make the organization very
"political", *unless* what it grants to is established its articles of
formation and not easily changed.
For example, it could grant excess profits to subsidize public
regional exchange points, and perhaps a fixed yearly amount
to the Internet Software Consortium which maintains BIND.
Adam
