another org to give money to?

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

At 5:15 AM -0600 1/28/97, Dan Rothstein wrote:
>Is it really necessary to develop another orginization to collect money?
>The registration process as it stands works fine. My company will be
>registering 700 domains this year at a cost of $150.00 per 2 years. That
>means I will be sending you $70,000. Now you want more? This is absurd!
>You are hosting DNS. If you pursue this course of action I will be
>recommending all our customers dump their .com and use another domain
>server.
>
>Don't be greedy. It will end a very lucrative deal for you.
>
>--
>Dan Rothstein                      dan at mc.net
>(847)516-5700               http://www.mc.net


Dan,

When I saw this posting, I followed up on your web page, and am very
positivel impressed.  You are pioneering responsible spam policy that I
wish every ISP, and certainly every NANOG participant, would read and
support similar policies.  Your domain registration fees to your users
obviously are marginal to cover your own costs, and are clearly
well-motivated.

I hope I am not letting my frustration over several recent postings
unfairly fall over onto you. At least from my first look, you run an
excellent ISP.  However, this is one more blast about principally DNS
issues, following Rol Murrow's blast on how domain registration fees and
other ill-defined charges hurt small nonprofits and startup ISPs, without
saying who should subsidize these people.  This, and some other postings,
were triggered in part by a news release from some people that at the time
did not make a clear distinction between naming and addressing issues.

Your comments about domain registration fees from NSI, and your possible
recommendation to your customers to use another TLD, may be right on.  I do
not pretend to be a DNS expert, certainly not an expert on DNS economics.

But this list doesn't deal with DNS pricing!  The whole ARIN proposal
involves separating the DNS process from the address and ASN allocation
process, two processes with different economics and different technical
characteristics.

Don't get me wrong.  I don't as yet endorse the fee structure in the ARIN
proposal, because I don't yet really understand its derivation.  It might
be right; it might be wrong.  With 20/20 hindsight, I believe it was unwise
to publish any dollar figures for services until there was much more
consensus on the ARIN scope and functions, leading to a budget, leading to
a fee structure. Early publication of fees of mystical origin upset many
people and caused avoidable flaming.

But can we please accept that DNS costs are outside the scope of this list?

Howard Berkowitz
PSC International (since we have been acquired again recently, this may not
be the exactly correct corporate name.  PSC something-or-other *wink*)