I'm glad you brought up the problems regarding multilingual
registrations. If anything, these show that IOD is not going to be able to handle
the rush to register .web domains. NSI has a technical staff that is second to none.
Their technical staff is composed of some of the most experienced people when it
comes to DNS. These are not people you find everyday and everywhere, and I highly
doubt that a new graduate from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (or any college for that
matter) is going to have the experience with DNS that a person from NSI is going
to have. NSI also has the type of REAL WORLD experience that IOD cannot even claim
to have. So, if you mention that NSI had troubles coping with demand, how can you
even begin to say that IOD is prepared to handle the load?20,000 registrations
over 4 years is nothing compared to the registrations that are processed DAILY by
NSI. I think it's safe to say that NSI handled MULTIPLES of 20,000 registrations
of multilingual domains yesterday; at least 1,000s in the first MINUTES as people
rushed to register (some people using scripts to flood their registrations in). IOD
has never been put to that kind of REAL WORLD test. Sure they've done testing. As
a network administrator specializing in Sun Microsystems servers, I've be part of
many TESTS that worked fine, but failed in the REAL WORLD. There are things in the
real world that happen that you will never see in tests. I'd be very surprised if
you could find any competent admin or developer that would tell you otherwise. That's
one major reason why applicants who wish to run TLDs that are going to be very popular
should have REAL WORLD experience that compares to what they are going to see with
the new TLD. Even being an ICANN accredited registrar would help IOD's case because
they would have had some experience with a real world system, but they haven't even
done that.
If the release of multilingual domains placed such a load on the registry
and REGISTRARS (note there is more than 1 registrar, and IOD will be the ONLY registrar
in the beginning), imagine what the release of .web is going to do. Afilias has taken
this into consideration, and has proposed a round robin system that will make the
load manageable. IOD plans to use a first come, first served, everybody rush to register
system. In the first few minutes of operation they will see a load on their systems
that they have no real world experience handling. 1000s upon 1000s of people will
be going to their site to register and many people will be using scripts to post
100s of registrations per minute. And, since they'll be the only registrar registering
.web domains on day 1, their site will no doubt crash, even if their registry holds
up (which I have questions about as well; Windows is definitely the wrong platform
for running a registry). Hopefully ICANN will select the technically superior Afilias
application and this won't happen, but if they select IOD I'll bet my house on it.
Bottom
line, I see nothing in their application that leads me to feel confident that they're
capable of handling the job of .web. Maybe they could handle a less popular TLD.
Like I said, I'm a network administrator so I do have at least some knowledge about
what I'm talking about. This is my opinion and you don't have to agree with it. However
it's getting really tiring reading these "IOD is technically superior" posts from
people who obviously have no expertise whatsoever in what they're saying. If you're
going to post "IOD is technically capable" or "IOD has a solid business plan", why
don't you post your job and relevant experience as well. Technical comments from
a janitor have about as much credibility as business comments from a bum.