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[ga] Who was NSI referrng to in the Jaguar and Mercedes remark?
from Internetnews.com:
Registry Glitch Derails Domain Offer
By Elizabeth Clampet
Many of those looking to take advantage of a Thursday promotion to register
free domains were met with access denials blamed on a glitch in Network
Solutions' registry.
RegisterFREE.com was set up to register domain names free for one hour
Thursday by NameEngine Inc. NameEngine is accredited by the International
Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The promotion was done to
promote the idea of free registration, said Anthony Van Couvering, president
of NameEngine.
He said that more than 100,000 people accessed the RegisterFREE.com site
during the promotion, but because of problems with NSI's (NSOL) registry,
only a few thousand were able to register domains for free.
"We had a few problems looking up names and that slowed some things down for
some people," Van Couvering said. "I feel bad about that, because I was
hoping that everyone who came in would have the same fine experience as some
people did."
NSI spokesman Brian O'Shaughnessy confirmed that NSI's registry, which
provides information on whether a domain is registered, experienced problems
between 7:15 and 8:35 p.m. Eastern Thursday, but was fully operational when
RegisterFREE's promotion began and 9 p.m. NSI is allowed four hours of "down
time" per month, and O'Shaughnessy called the coincidence in times a "fluke."
Although NameEngine is ICANN-accredited, its services are not yet functional.
So for the promotion the company entrusted the technology of Tucows OpenSRS
system to provide the actual registration. Tucows also provided special
consulting and systems to support the promotion. Tucows paid NSI $6 for each
registration, but its fee to NameEngine was not disclosed.
Van Couvering said the problems it had with registration will not stop the
company from offering a similar promotion in the near future.
"I'm tremendously satisfied with all the response," he said. Domain names are
a database transaction, and they ought to be free."
"There are certainly some people who will sell you value-added-services, and
maybe one wants to pay for them. I completely understand that and it's a very
valid business model. But the domain name itself is not much more than a
domain name, and the one you get from one (registrar) is the same as one you
get from the other. It's becoming a commodity market."
NSI's O'Shaughnessy disagreed, saying free doesn't always mean better.
"It's all well and good to say that people want things free, but not
everybody wants to drive a Yugo either," he said in defense of
pay-for-registration services. "People are going to want to drive Jaguars,
Mercedes, BMWs and Cadillacs."
"Just because something's cheap doesn't make it good. We are also
experimenting with our pricing and we began some initial experimentation over
the last couple of months, and we will continue to do so as the marketplace
changes."
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