Response by Nominet Chair to Open Letter

[Whois-Search]

This morning Kieren McCarthy from The Register covered our Open Letter:

UK's internet registry prepares a £100m windfall for its board members – and everyone else will pay for it

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/05/nominet_domain_windfall/

Then following that article a similar response (read the quotes) was posted on the Nominet forum to those that signed the letter:

https://3million.uk/board-response/

 

[RobM]

'..The funds or credit limits are designed to ensure that successful registrations can be paid for, and to avoid gaming of the system...'

Yeah because obviously you need £45,000 to register £4500 worth of domains.
Well I suppose it saves them coding in:
if (registration_cost>funds)
echo 'Sorry (actually unlikely as sorry isn't in the nominet vocabulary) - you don't have enough money';

Usual nominet response assuming everyone is stupid.

 

[ian]

The whole response wreaks of "we are sorry YOU feel this way". Not sure it would have taken them much to allow manual registration via the WDM without EPP access.

 

[Nigel]

That article and photo on The Register sums up .uk perfectly. Always was a money making exercise - pushed thro' by the large registrars - who are now going to get their reward.

 

[RobM]

It's probably all a public charade anyway. It really wouldn't surprise me to find that when they release the domains some are not even available - people won't know they'll just think they missed them. Of course they'll go to godaddy or whoever is paying nominet board members the highest. We'll know after the release when we look at the tag spread.

 

[ChrisG]

New to the politics of Nominet - but I don't get why they had a short window to get access. At the end of the day if our registrar tech doesn't work then that's our problem. They can and do already lock us out if we hit the server too many times so claiming accidental DDos doesn't stack up.
We got ourselves ready to get involved, could probably deal with the cash barrier, but then screwed up on actually having access. Dohh...

 

[Whois-Search]

New to the politics of Nominet - but I don't get why they had a short window to get access.

Nominet basically want to define and test the maximum number of EPP / Database requests at anyone time.

So if you know how many EPP requests each of the 800 registrars have per minute ... you can build the servers to cope with the maximum demand at 2pm.

It’s more about them not looking bad (if it were to fall over) rather than allowing more registrsrs to join in now (at the same limits) and spend more money on resources.

 

[ChrisG]

800 registrars *150 domains doesn't seem like a particularly heavy load to me. I'd struggle to see it needing more than a moderate server, though I obviously don't understand the full tech stack.

 

[Whois-Search]

800 registrars *150 domains doesn't seem like a particularly heavy load to me. I'd struggle to see it needing more than a moderate server, though I obviously don't understand the full tech stack.

I would like Nominet to give everyone 150 requests at least in the first hour after 2pm

However when you start to consider...

800 x 150 = 120,000 per minute
120,000 x 60 = 7,200,000 requests an hour

And they are going to drop per day:

600,000 names (if 3 million left) at 2pm
400,000 names (if 2 million left) at 2pm
200,000 names (if 1 million left) at 2pm

And out of those only 10% will be worth catching...

It’s most likely not a good idea to have an extra 7 million requests being fired at 60-20k names?

 

[keys]

I get the feeling that tier/quotas are losing significance, because only scraps will be left to compete for.

 

[ukdomains]

Even if we have 20,000 domains to compete against then you have second tier competition (multi tags) to compete against . The big boys of private/public drop catching so from the 20,000 we can remove a fair amount.

 

[Whois-Search]

If Nominet’s system doesn’t just fall over at 2pm with an unintentional DDOS caused by 800 registrars (with 6 EPP connections open each) all firing their full quota 6,9,60,150 requests asynchronously...

Then yes it’s all over in the first millisecond.

We will be lucky to get 6 good names each...

 

[davedevelopment]

The Register article got branded "Fake News" by the Nominet CEO - https://www.nominet.uk/the-trouble-with-fake-news/