Re: Specific Questions

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Dave Crocker allegedly said:
> 
[...]
> >Therefore, fees of $20,000 would not be necessary.
> 
> 	There are lots of ways to obtain money.  Each has tradeoffs.  Since
> the registrars will be generating a revenue stream, what's the problem with
> tapping those who will be generating the stream to pay for their selection
> process?  A side-effect of this approach is to provide a bit of financial
> vetting for applicants.

Dave, something that I don't recall seeing in the draft is what later 
registrars will pay -- as I recall, the $20000 was for the first 
20-30.  Supposing that this idea takes off, and in three years we 
have several hundred registrars, are all of them supposed to pay 
$20000 as well?  That would be on the order of 10 million dollars.  
If the late arrivals *don't* pay the same amount, however, the first 
25 might be rather upset at having to finance a system that the 
latecomers get to use.  

Off the top, I can think of two other ways to handle the financial 
issue: 

First, require a $30,000 deposit from each applicant, keep careful 
records of the costs of setting things up, and refund any surplus.  
Thus at least the applicants would have some assurance that they were 
paying only for their costs.

Second, do like Chris and others want -- allow any applicants at all,
charge nothing, and have them all share a .exp (for "experimental")
TLD for an extended period -- say six months or a year.  They would be
required to get a large scale shared registry running in that time. 
After the year a good number will be weeded out, and the registrars
themselves could vote to remove incompetents.  The suffering users of
the .exp TLD would automatically be given domains in non-experimental
registries at the end of the year. 

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov		the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E  87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F