Daniel Karrenberg <daniel.karrenberg@ripe.net> writes: Hi Daniel,
There may well be further examples of this sort of thing in the other non-core activities of RIPE NCC. Why would anyone pay for a place on my DNSSEC training course (if I was selling one) when NCC is offering their course for free?
Who is selling DNSSEC courses? The whole point of DISI is to kick-start
We do. I.e. not Autonomica, but Lars-Johan Liman, Patrik Fältström and myself privately teach DNS courses on all levels since years back, including a two day course on DNSSEC. And, yes, we have had students actually cancel their seats at a scheduled course because RIPE NCC staff came to Stockholm and taught DNSSEC for free. While I can personally live with that (at least as long as you don't turn up in Stockholm too often ;-) I do think it is a clear example of the difficulties with your position of being effectively a monopoly that wants to do the right thing for the Internet. Johan PS. With the Autonomica hat on: we also do DNS monitoring, quite similar to dnsmon, and for exactly the same reasons, i.e. to monitor our various DNS services, i.root-servers.net being one of them. To offset our costs for this we are offering this service on some sort of cost recovery basis to interested parties like TLDs. Obviously even a cheap service will never be able to compete with a free one, especially since the hassle of the billing process will make both parties walk away. And, yes, we are RIPE members, so just as in the Nominum case this is our membership fees working against us. In the end this is all about education. Everyone needs to understand that there is a cost associated with providing a service. If the service is offered "for free" that is just a metaphor for "someone else is paying for it".