Re: [registrars] Regarding membership list

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bob,

While I do need to read the RC bylaws and rules, which I now have thanks
to Tim (ASCII is always appreciated) and Bruce (URL also appreciated), I
was aware of the one vote per controlling interest restriction.

That (RC voting rights) wasn't an issue at Rome, in the context of WLS,
which is what I _think_ pre-2003 registrars mean when they express some
concern about gaming the (unspecified) definition of a "registrar". The
issue of defining "legitimacy" is probably not going to go away any time
soon, possibly because of the rate of new accreditations.

I'll write Dan later today and ask for specifics on accreditations. The
registry constituency should have some dim awareness, at least of the
rate of growth of drop pool address space and thread access to the CNO
registry set. Another letter to write.

Submitting applications at a rate of 100/mo must consume a considerable
amount of ICANN staff resources. As I watch my own backorder revenue
tend towards zero, it concerns me some. I don't think anyone has given
much thought to how registry-registrar authentication "works", or how
ICANN registry constituency process "works", where the size of the set
of gtld-accredited registrars is not on the order of 100, but on the
order of 1,000 or 10,000. This was discussed briefly in the PROVREG WG
in the context of James Seng's alternative model, and not adopted due
to the problem of scaling the EPP authentication mechanism orders of
magnitude greater then the then-70-or-so registrars.

It just occured to me tht at some point, the rate of accreditation can
exceed the rate of OT&E scheduled resources at the registries, resulting
in queue growth.

We (or at least me) could be concerned that per-thread drop pool revenue 
is in free-fall, or that the RC's process is about to be swallowed by
hundreds of new independent registrars who share a single, or some few
"registrar incubators" as their points of origin, or that one of the
many design assumptions of the existing set of provisioning protocols is
forseeably invalidated, or all three.

Thank you for the additional data you've sent me. There is some humor in
all of this. Try and avoid going to the beach on typhoon days. MB the
kids and I tried this at Cape Hatteras two weeks ago. The surfing was good,
but there are some down-sides to torrential rain and high winds.

Eric