Re: usdns.org

["Mark Borchers" <markb () infi net>]

> My suggestion to ISI at this point would be to distinguish between
> "community" registrars and "commercial" registrars.  A community registrar
> must have a reasonable relation to the place for which it's a registry,
> e.g. live or have an office within 20 miles of it, and handle registrations
> at no charge.  Commercial registries have no such restrictions.  In case of
> conflicting requests between community and commercial registrars, the
> community registrar wins.
This seems like the seed of a great idea, although the 20-mile 
restriction may be too tight.

I'm thinking specifically of a regional ISP from the NSFNet days 
which...

- Provided US domain registration services in a very professional 
manner for roughly an entire state.

- Never charged for registration (still doesn't as far as I know)

- Did a lot to promote use of the US domain within its region

On a related note, last year ISI, evidently in response to the 
problem you describe, announced that US subregistries would be 
limited to 50 delegations apiece.  I don't know if this limit was 
applied retroactively to subregistries that were already handling a 
larger number of subdomains or not.