On Thu, 20 Oct 1994 19:15:29 +0100 (MET) you said:

Hank, while I don't really see a problem with the actual amounts of your charges, can you explain how you arrived at this arrangement besides your obvious discussions with the Ministry of Communications?

Did the organisations that are affected by this change have any say?

We really tried to keep the charges at cost. Back when we were pushing the Internet in the wasteland of ignorance (now - everyone is suddenly an Internet maven :-)), a number of government ministries formed a committee to direct the way the Internet was to be handled in Israel. They were: Min of Communciation, Min of Science, Min of Industry and Trade and Min of Education. They each took the responsibility of representing their constituents. When we initially presented the request to charge for registration services the committee invited the existing ISPs to a meeting and asked their opinion. Of course they said they would do it for free but later that week called me and said they didn't realize what it would really cost. That is when we put in the request for central funding which would have allowed us to continue handing out IP numbers and domain names. Over the past year an interesting anomoly arose. One of the ISPs started charging sites a monthly fee for their own domain name (as well as a registration fee), while we did the work and registered the domain for free. ISPs also started to abuse the free service by asking for sometimes two or three aliases for the same domain. ISPs were not careful in their domain requests. They would quickly send in a request for a domain and only later after talking to the company they were connecting, request to change the domain to something else at the company's request. After the Ministry turned down the request (they still don't understand Internet at all), and after 3 more ISPs opened up, we realized we couldn't keep doing it for free. We stated the alternatives that are available for any ISP. The only "monopoly" we have is on the .il domain and we would gladly delegate it or parts to others as long as there is mutual consensus.

Simon

I'm curious to hear if others have done something similar or will in the near future. Hank