I have actually thought about an adopt an ostrich program. It's an interesting thought - and should be at least as popular as adopt a lamb .

As for how .us pre-registrations work, every Registrar or Reseller has their own rules and prices.

We charge $14.99 a year, but you pay when you apply for the domain. That is because we have to cover the costs when the registrations are actually processed - when the Registry opens up on the 24th. If we did't have our account at OpenSRS fully funded on the 24th, and your name was the one that came up - we would not get it for you.

If you are not awarded your domain name, we automatically refund your credit card. We expect a high rate of return, however we are prepared to process refunds all night if needed on the 24th to return fees to applicants who do not get their domain names.

There are also Registrars who are charging fees just to apply for the domain. They cannot legally do this according to the Registry rules for .us, so they call them consulting fees for application review and other nonsense.

We know that some speculators are not using us to pre-register domains because we are forcing them to pay in advance, but that's OK. We are not in a position to cover $100k in domain speculation costs for other people - and we have committed to funding our account at the 100% level during the registration processing so we don't lose anyone's domain because we only guessed that 30% of the domains would be registered successfully. We have heard one other reseller who is not requiring his customers to pay in advance, but he is only funding his account at the 20% level based on prior pre-registration success levels.

Everyone plays the game differently, and that's good for competition.

-t