Adds a bit more to my comments (both links bottom of page)by Kendall Dawson
http://www.paradigm.nu/about.html
The
Register is running a story on Afilias and the .info launch. It appears that a representative
called them to explain the whole .info fiasco. And, surprise! surprise! it really
isn't their fault according to the story. After reading the article, I had a few
thoughts (original words in italics mine in bold):
"It has not been the smoothest,
most error-free launch," Roland La Plante, chief marketing officer of Afilias admitted.
"But please keep in mind no one has launched a new TLD in recent years."
[BOLD]
WRONG! There have been dozens of CCTLDs launched, some very large. CC, TO, TV come
to mind. New.net launched a whole registration system with no problems. IOD has been
running .Web for over 5 years with no problems. This is just plainly not true. The
truth is that Afilias fielded a woefully underpowered system, failed to test it,
and is now paying the price. Afilias did exactly what ICANN accused IOD of wanting
to do: they chose to field a simple system and pay for the real buildout out of revenue.
Well, the revenue doesn't cut it, and neither does the system. Oh, and IOD never
intended to do that.[/BOLD]
Are there any lessons to be learnt? "Yes," he told
us. "If we did it again, before we went live we would test it under a more significant
load. We would also have taken steps to make it more difficult to put the wrong information
into the [domain registration] form. For example, we didn't specify how to put dates
in, we just had a date field. This has made it harder to do an effective search."
[BOLD] You mean just like Image Online Design has already done? You mean the simulations
that IOD ran that ICANN dismissed?[/BOLD]
What of complaints that Afilias' real-time
registering system for the public had to be pulled down? "We did pull down our system
for 46 hours to do some tweaking but it has been running very smoothly ever since.
All the major issues have been resolved and we are able to handle demand. But you
have to understand that all of this was done on a global stage and was an open process."
[BOLD] An open process? WHERE? What open process?[/BOLD]
Mr La Plante suggests
Mr Connelly wanted the list in order to know which domains not to attempt to register.
While he acknowledges the list was finally made available very soon after Mr Connelly's
public condemnation of the process, Mr La Plante denies this is evidence of Afilias'
stalling and claims the file simply wasn't ready before that time.
[BOLD] Wasn't
ready?! "SELECT domain FROM domainlist ORDERBY ascending" ... there's your list.
Mr. La Plante is either technically ignorant or disingenuous. Or both.[/BOLD]
"I
don't think we could have developed a perfect system," Mr La Plante told us, reflecting
on the past few months. Although it could certainly have been better than the one
which was offered.
[BOLD] They could have called Image Online Design! What if
they had given IOD .web back in November of 2000?[/BOLD]
http://www.icbtollfree.com/Article.cfm?ArticleId=5467
free
reg. req.
http://forum.icann.org/cgi-bin/rpgmessage.cgi?newtldagmts;3BC581FE00000FD3