[ncdnhc-discuss] taking politics out of the .org delegation

[Marc Schneiders]

On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, at 11:01 [=GMT-0500], Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School...:

> what is .org worth?  As I understand it, the incumbent keeps all the fees
> paid for registrations to date, however long they are, and the new bidder
> takes on the uncompensated task of keeping those entries updated until
> renewed.  So on day one, it's a big liability...  or am I missing
> something?

There is the $5M, plus free services for one year:

"5.1.5
Registry Operator further agrees that it will make available
to the party designated by ICANN as successor operator of the .org
registry the use of global resolution and distribution facilities, at
no charge until 31 December 2003, and thereafter at a price to be
determined, for so long as Registry Operator is also the operator of the
.com registry." (From the ORG contract with VeriSign:
http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/verisign/registry-agmt-org-25may01.htm)

What exactly the 'distribution facilities' are, I do not know. The
registry operation?

The registry does not have to do that much updating. It does not have
names and addresses etc. of registrants, the registrars have these. The
only data at the registry are (as far as I can see):

domain
nameservers
registrar
expiry date
date of last change

All this is updated 'by computers'.

The registry does also have to take care of a decent set of nameservers,
of course. VeriSign does this for free for new ORG (see above) for a year.
Their TLD servers are quite OK. Even more distributed than the
root-servers.net.