Nominet Non Exec Directorship - Elections

[aZooZa]

My support of Graeme Wingate - candidate for Non Exec in the forthcoming elections.

If you have a vote, please use it for Graeme:

Quote:

All I really ask for is a stable marketplace. My partner and I have invested a great deal of time, effort and money in our secondary market business. We just follow the rules. The people in this market know us as principled people; and this constant battering is a little annoying to say the least, especially when we're ladled into the 'squatting' stew pot without any muslin.

It seems that Nominet have no real technical guidance since Jay Daley departed.

Why on earth has this useless 'double DAC' appeared?

I have a few real gripes that should have been addressed by Nominet but still go unanswered.

Let's see:

1. An unworkable and plainly inept suggestion in the DAC rules that users should not disseminate more than 1,000 names in 24 hours; i.e. names derived from the DAC or one of the 'whois' variants.

2. It's against the rules to keep any DAC/whois/whois2 data on a machine for longer than 7 days. When are the actions going to take place against domaintools.com and aboutus.org -- and all the other sites that store millions of records?

3. The elimination of the suspension flag in the DAC output. The motive here is apparently to ease the load on the database. What load? All the ASCII responses from the DAC that give a "Y/N" response could be filtered down to a single byte hex/decimal output, with bits set logically according to the status. It would be up to the programmer to interpret those single bytes for each record. That's a *heck* of a decrease in bandwidth.

Example today:

DAC output:

lesley.co.uk,Y,N,Y,1999-03-25,2009-03-25,4,[TAG]

Take the ,Y,N,Y, (seven bytes) and change it to three:

00000101 (one 8-bit byte) plus the two separating commas = 3 bytes. That's four bytes taken from every DAC query. That's also a *lot* of bytes reduced over the entire DAC query bandwidth each day, with each member having 432,000 shots.

This output can actually be further reduced but I'll leave it there for now.

4. No clear policy on 'favoured' renewals, whereby names that are supposed to drop just don't. I appreciate that there may be extenuating circumstances; especially with limited companies, but there needs to be a declaration of policy.

5. Why don't Nominet adopt the Canadian 'TBR' system? Drop list compilers would not be necessary and Nominet could publish a list of dropping domains a week in advance, and have them all drop at once at a certain time and day of the week.

6. The protection of the Nominet database. Anyone who knows Unix will know that a .uk database can be built without touching the DAC/whois/whois2 utilities.

If all this sort of thing could be locked down and made transparent, I would suggest that some people viewing this would feel easier about the secondary market.

As far as self regulation goes, maybe it's time for the catchers to manually vet every booking they get and refuse those that, in their opinion, are potential 'squats' and likely DRS candidates? Not impossible to do. But these days these bookings are *very* few and far between.

I have been doing this for over two years; Nominet know I play by the rules, and if I ever have a point of controversy or an ethical question, I always ask them.

So maybe people here might reconsider their stance on the 'pariah' that is today's secondary marketeer, or more definitively, a dropcatcher.

Nora is an excellent non exec candidate. If only she were more ubiquitous. Graeme has taken his campaign very public -- he fights his corner and I just thought it might be appropriate for me to elaborate on my position given the fact that I openly support him.

I see some participants here asking whether the 'Digital Britain' report has been fully understood. Well yes, it has, but the problem is that is states (non verbatim so I'll paraphrase) that dropcatching is already an unacceptable practice. Nominet, since when would you agree with that?

Regards,

Dale