Presumably in the pooled EPP scenario, Nominet see themselves as selling tickets to a lottery that would be held once a day at the same time. Each £600 EPP connection is in effect one entry, and no entity can purchase more than 10 entries. (In theory, wink wink, etc.)
From Nominet's POV they have to build a system that can absorb a phenomenal surge once a day but which wouldn't be overly taxed the rest of the time. Assuming that the drops really did go on a schedule, and that Nominet stuck to it, there would be little call to do lookups any other time of day except to check Whois/ownership, see what had been taken in the drop that day, etc.
The economically controlled option, with a dedicated drop catching EPP connection and a requirement for any participant to pay a minimum of £600 p/a for 6 connections and with a possibility to buy extra connections in batches of 6 for a further £600 p/a up to a total of 60 connections (10 batches at £6000 p/a) relies on the drop time of domain names being published which would
either be one single time during each day
or individual times per domain name possibly based on each domain names original creation timestamp.
It’s not a lottery ticket system because there is a technical requirement to create and send the EPP request at exactly the right moment in either drop time scenario. Nominet do not consider that anyone would really need to pay for more than a single £600 p/a fee because the drop timestamp information is now published beforehand and the requirement to use the DAC no longer exists, however they obviously recognise that some will would wish to do so and would rather let them do it in this way instead of signing up for more unnecessary memberships to gain
a perceived advantage.
The idea that Nominet staff are going to do sit down in an office or over video call for face to face interviews with prospective members to ask them to promise they aren’t working in concert with any other member is absurd. A huge expense and waste of time that wouldn’t prove anything.
The annual fee for membership including access to all systems required to drop catch has been the same for a very long time and it is no barrier to any sort of collusion, permitting all and sundry with a very basic understanding and no requirement to have any technical ability because hosted services exist operating on mandatory revenue share basis, which is at no way arms length, and with a cost of doing so akin to the price of a streaming music service subscription or a basic mobile phone contract per month, to involve themselves. People will and do break the spirt of the rules and game things.
I agree that there is a perceived benefit of auctions because it clearly demonstrates added values of premium domain names to the general public, potentially assisting in existing domain name registrants/portfolio operators receiving better prices.
Nominet choosing to dedicate resources to assign value to individual domain names and then pricing them at a premium
isn’t something that is a “next on the agenda” type thing. Doing that requires a lot of work when an auction model functions more efficiently. The market decides the value of any domain name at the time it is auctioned, as is the case with .ee (Estonia) for example. Proceeds from the auctions are likely to be ring fenced.
Nominet didn’t ignore rule breaking for a long time in order to eventually bring this to the table and blame people for not following the spirit of the rules. Actually policing rule breaking is ineffective and clearly not possible because it’s not difficult to separate things out with multiple individuals all using the same system and state “yes we are all truly separate people and each of us pays their own bills. Here’s the proof. We are all operating at arms length even if we do happen to all know of each other.” Nominet has to take people at their word on the basis of something such as this. They do investigate technical collusion but it’s often incredibly hard to prove this even if certain people seem to be doing exceptionally well.
Nominet have always largely looked the other way in respect of the secondary market, hence the proliferation of members joining exclusively to interact with Nominet systems to be involved with it.
Maintaining the DAC for dropcatching is inefficient as the product has been criticised for having had various flaws over the years, hence removing the requirement to use it for drop catching is technically sensible. The DAC is a particularly non-standard when stacked against most other registries. There is a move towards the idea of operating to general standards.
Many of the 2019 consultation roundtable and submitted responses suggested the auction model and letting the market determine the value of an expiring domain name. It’s fairly common for registries to operate in this way. The idea for the token system (see the policy document) stems from .ee and is based on a standard RFC. The winner of an auction receives a token which they may take to any registrar to register the domain name they have won.
but 'sigh' didn't join today, bloody lurker
