Re: 60 day waiting period

["Terry O'Neill" <toneill@mariner.com>]

As a web presence provider, my company is adamantly opposed to a 60 day
waiting period for domain names. 

The 60 day policy means that the minimum implementation time for a website
with an xxxx.yyy domain name is 60 days, strictly because of the 60 day
policy, regardless of our capability to complete all other phases of
development much more quickly.

The vast majority of the websites we develop are for small businesses with
small budgets; the sites are generally complete within a week. The 60-day
policy would mean that the number of websites in development at any given
time would be seven times as large as it is now. Eighty percent of those
would be complete in every respect except for the release of their domain
names. 

While the hard cost of this is difficult to quantify, it is easy to see
that the 60 day policy would make our service more expensive. Instead of
tracking a few concurrent projects, we would have to track a perpetual
backlog of projects eight times larger. Even if there is no active
development going on for most of these projects, scheduling concerns,
billing issues, and customer hand-holding over this extended period would
most definitely add to our costs.

And by the time their domain names are approved, most of the websites we
build will have been sitting dormant for nearly two months. Websites will
be out of date by the time we activate them. They may even be obsolete
depending on what new products have been released, who's gone out of
business, and what special features have been built into their web page.
Customer satisfaction drops, and development costs to fix these problems
rises. By the time their websites go live most of our customers will have
lost much of their enthusiasm for the project, the Internet, and the World
Wide Web.

The sixty-day policy tilts the Internet in favor of larger organizations
and against smaller ones, even while the vast majority of businesses on the
web are small. If the Internet is still intended to be accessible to
everyone, the urge to build in technically-unnecessary administrative
barriers must be resisted.

Terry O'Neill
Mariner Systems Services Inc.