🚀 go-pugleaf

wag@swl.msd.ray.com (William Gianopoulos {84718}) wrote:

>NSI currently gets $5.5 million annually for this process (evidently
>a figure aggreed to in the competitive bidding process).

Which is already astrononomical.  From what I understand, they have less than
10 employees working on domain registration, and that's why they're so far
behind.  Add to that perhaps 50,000 per year for hardware, maybe another 75k
for some office space, say 30k per year for a net connection, plus employees.
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say they pay their clerical
employees well and pay them $75,000 per year, plus a network admin or two --
say 200k.  Add incidentals of say 200k, and you have like 1.3 mil or something.
per year.  Hardly 5 million.  And that's just maintence.  I'm not even counting
the 20some million they're going to get from new registrations.  They could
double their employees, not charge a maintence fee, charge $20 for
registration, and still make a 3 million dollar profit.  I can see how the
govt. commissioned them to do it -- the net was different back then, and there
weren't so many people who knew the beauracuracy of the NSF and also had the
knowledge to set this up.  Anyway, now that they're only providing free service
for edu and gov, what makes them guardians of com, org, and net?  Essentally
they're only as powerful as site admins let them be.  What's to stop me from
downloading the whois database, setting up the relevant servers, and declare
myself the new internic?  Hell, if I can get site admins to listen and have
athoratative name servers do their updates from me, I *AM* the internic.  I
sure don't have the time or knowledge to set this up, but I know there are
people that do. 

--
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David Kammeyer                                    kammeyer@interaccess.com
"The general public is a      | Yes, I use PGP.  Finger me for my key. 
 pretty stupid person" - Me   | Linux -- The choice of a GNU generation!
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