As for your assertions that CORE is about to open up the application process no-one is convinced of this. Furthermore, the current technical and fiscal requirements CORE places as the minimum are wildly exagerated. The USG Green Paper makes the same error. By setting standards so high just about every individual or not for profit group and most of the so called Third or Under-Developed World is shut *out* of the picture forever. US$10,000 and a US$300,000 line of credit are unattainable. Not when one will make pennies per domain in profits or funds raised.
This is *again* one of those arguments that gets beaten into the dust, people seem to accept that it's a fallacy, and after a few months it comes up again. -sigh-. For the umpteenth time, connectivity in itself is INCREDIBLY expensive in 3rd world countries. There seems to be some sort of economic law which imposes that the more technologically backward a country is, the more expensive the links are (in REAL money, which means that relative to the average income, the prices rocket). Here in Guadeloupe we have a 256K link at the ISP where I work, for this we pay ~80,000ff (around $13,000) PER MONTH (just think of the link you can get in the U.S. for that price). Btw, that price INCLUDES "generous" discounts from the Telco... And Guadeloupe is a French province (albeit in the Caribbean). Go somewhere deep in Africa or even a place like India, and LINK prices soar. What I'm trying to say is that if the 3rd world company is large enough to be able to afford a link, it CERTAINLY has assets way beyond $300K, and $10K is more or less peanuts for them. If anything, this hurts the wanabees who think that because they can afford their 64K link they are ready to take on the world (yes Bob, I mean you), which are -of course- mostly located in U.S. & Canada, because nowhere else can you get permanent 64K links to the 'net for $100/month or less... You can continue to complain that it shuts out companies like yours, but leave out the 3rd world because *this* is not what is shutting them out. Apart from that... Probably it's going to be hard to recover cash through registrar operation, which is exactly as it should be, because something that you're nearly OBLIGED to get (a domain name) should not be open to someone who wants to bleed you for it. Name registration should be a service that companies have in addition to something else and rarely just as a service in itself (because of the low margins). It's natural that a contractor can sell you (amongst other things) a brick, but you wouldn't expect a building contractor to base a business on solely selling bricks. The NATURAL registrar is going to be an ISP, and only rarely will you have other types of companies (the other types which I can envision are the NetNames type or IDnames, or vi.net... a purely niche market). Look at the UK market to see what I mean. Yours, John Broomfield. -------- Logged at Mon Feb 16 13:01:22 MET 1998 ---------