Re: .COM Clusters are Not RSCs

[Kent Crispin <kent at songbird.com>]

On Sat, Mar 21, 1998 at 02:26:59AM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:
[...]
> 
> > Second, what prevents you in a free-and-open TLD system from switching to
> > another domain?  You would have to reprint your business cards and tell
> > people?  
> 
> and change every reference to your URLs...

An altavista search reveals 160,000 pages with links to amazon.com, 
and 850,000 pages with links to yahoo.com.  Just a little bit more 
than changing a few business cards...
[...]

> > And CORE brings them competiton?  Pardon me, but CORE will own the database
> > - for all TLDs - under their world-view.
> 
> Yes, but the CORE registrars compete with one other to keep prices down.
> The registry might need to raise prices, but that's probably not a problem
> as long as the CORE members don't profit from that happening.  If they
> cannot profit, the CORE members have an incentive to keep costs as low
> as possible.

The registry operator under the CORE system is selected through a
competitive bid.  The CORE SRS is also designed so that it can be
segmented on TLD boundaries, so there can be multiple registry
operators running under contract to CORE, and, in fact, there are 
good robustness reasons to split the operation across multiple 
operators. 

The CORE registry runs on a cost-recovery basis, so it has little
incentive to raise prices, and, being constrained to run on a
cost-recovery basis, there isn't much opportunity for registrars to
conspire to make it raise prices.  Furthermore, the whole system runs
under the policy control of the POC.  The POC has no significant
financial incentive to raise prices (some POC expenses are reimbursed
from CORE, but there are no salaries, stock options, or other
financial incentives for POC members), and since half the POC will be
elected from the community at large, there is significant incentive to
keep prices low. 

-- 
Kent Crispin, PAB Chair			"No reason to get excited",
kent at songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html