Hello Paul,

Even if VeriSign spent nearly an infinite amount of money on this problem (to "expand their capabilities"), and if we kept the status quo, then, because it costs very close to absolutely nothing to pound the crap out of the registry, all registrars would increase their registry pounding rates to the level that would immediately use up absolutely all the vast capabilities that the nearly infinite amount of money purchased. While at the same time, we would not register even one more name than we did with the system that did not have the vast capabilities.

Exactly. Verisign really needs to develop an appropriate model in consultation with registrars for allocating a recently deleted name when there is more than one registrar seeking access to that name. Ie this is essentially a contention problem. The current method of resolving contention is ridiculous. The first-come, first-served model is really only appropriate where there is little chance of contention for a particular name at a particular time. If you were to announce on radio (or the Internet) that the first person to be at your house by 9am tomorrow would get a $1 million - I am sure you will appreciate that first-come, first-served model would not work. If however you were to announce that the first person to be at your house by 9am tomorrow, will get the chance to buy your old car at the current market price - then that would be different. The methods for resolving contention include: - sealed bid - auction - lottery ticket - choose a registrar at random from a list of registrars wanting the name .biz tried the lottery model and that presented problems - particularly on an international level, as I assume various licences etc are required to run a lottery. Some registries tried variants of the random model when opening up their name spaces for registration. I believe the most economically efficient model is auction. I am interested to hear if there are other methods (which scale). If the auction model is chosen (whether to obtain a name when a new registry starts, or when a name is released again for registration), then the more interesting question is who gets the proceeds. Regards, Bruce Tonkin