Re: [registrars] Posting from Snapnames

["Ross Wm. Rader" <ross@tucows.com>]

This post bothers me for a number of reasons, the most irksome of which is
related to this quote:

"A final note.  VeriSign's WLS proposal was never intended to go outside of
the Registrars Constituency that requested it, including to the media.  A
member of that Constituency forwarded the proposal to resellers, speculator
customers, and the media, and that resulted in the story becoming, well, a
story.  After this process was set in motion, and an information vacuum
created, VeriSign and SnapNames were obliged to release further information
for public consumption."

On or about January 1, SnapNames employee's were already talking publicly
about their participation in this effort (see quoted text below). This
proposal was public the second that it hit this mailing list, which
continues to be archived in order to uphold our desire for transparency
around the decision making processes of the constituency. The information
vacuum referred to above was, if not created by SnapNames, certainly
encouraged by SnapNames.

There is much to say about the larger issue, but I leave this small piece
with you over the weekend to digest.

-rwr

"> To answer some questions, and generate lively dialog:
>
> - It is now public knowledge that SnapNames has licensed a significant
> portion of our parallel registry technology to VeriSign, which we
> customized to the unique com/net registry architecture. VeriSign
> selected SnapNames as a development partner because of our reputation as
> having the deepest experience and highest consistent success rate in the
> field, as well as our non-biased relationships with multiple registrars
> and registries. Being an infrastructure provider, and not a registrar or
> registry ourselves, our system design philosophy was perfectly aligned
> to
> the Registry's objective of providing equal access to al registrars and
> registrants.
>
> - Our existing customers WILL be taken care of. We have not yet resolved
> with VeriSign all the details of how our customers' standing
> subscriptions will be transitioned to the new system, but SnapNames'
> guarantees that they will transition at no additional cost to our
> customers. We will be able to speak more conclusively by the end of the
> comment period.
>
> - After VGRS's live production cut-over on March 20th, customers will be
> able to purchase subscriptions from any participating registrar or
> reseller. We will still offer the service on our site, along with some
> state-of-the-art portfolio management tools we are developing, but will
> ourselves only be a reseller (as we are today) of other accredited
> registrars.
>
> - For our customers who presently employ SnapBack to monitor domain
> names
> as well as backorder them, we will unbundle the existing product into
> two
> separate services, since the VGRS Domain Wait List Service does not
> provide the monitoring function. Again, there will be no incremental
> cost to our existing customers.
>
> Nelson Brady,  Snapnames.com