Re: New proposal from Ronald J. Fitzherbert

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>]

Kent Crispin writes:
> Perry E. Metzger allegedly said:
> > Kent Crispin writes:
> > > Authenticated email to a neutral third party announcing a claim to the
> > > name is sufficient -- the email's time of arrival at the neutral third
> > > party would be the "locking mechanism".
> > 
> > Now that you have introduced a neutral third party, why go through all
> > this effort to parse email and introduce worries about delivery
> > latency and such just to avoid having the neutral third party run a
> > simple database lock, when having the party run a database locking
> > mechanism is probably much easier? I mean, this is a decades old
> > technology that is well understood.
> 
> You don't have to parse email, you only have to keep it for 30 days,
> and scan backward if a conflict arises.

Having been involved in the construction of several online systems, it
is my solidly held opinion that efforts to save "time" and "effort" by
taking "shortcuts" of this sort lead to loss of time, extreme expense,
and customer anger.

Dispute resolution is something like 80% or 90% of the cost of most
online systems like this. You are increasing that cost instead of
lowering it. I find this to be a dubious economy. Statements like "oh,
no one will argue about 'songbird.com'" or "disputes are rare" at the
very best miss the point. A tiny percent dispute rate can absorb all
the rest of the income a system brings in.

This is 1996, not 1966. We have decades of experience building sold on
line transaction systems that automatically handle such things and
make disputes nearly non-existant. They are cheap and easy to design
at this point -- they are a well understood problem. Inefficient Ad
hoc mechanisms like keeping around email for thirty days and having
humans (HUMANS!) scan it in case of a dispute, when a decent and cheap
mechanism could eliminate both the source of the dipute and the
humans, is one of the worst sorts of false economy I can think of.

> There is essentially zero effort to set this up, far less effort
> than even the minimal effort to set up a database.

A database takes very little time to set up, and once in place runs
itself. I don't understand this aversion to databases you appear to
have. It doesn't seem to have much of a rational basis.

Databases are your friend. A good relational database cuts down work
by an order of magnitude in such a system.

> Even in .com you probably get very very few name conflicts in a
> months time.

Repeat after me: dispute resolution is 80 or 90% of the cost of
operating any transaction system -- all effort expended to reduce the
need for dispute resolution in advance is worth the cost.

Chisel that in stone and put it over your desk.

Perry