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[ga] Who was NSI referrng to in the Jaguar and Mercedes remark?



from Internetnews.com:

Registry Glitch Derails Domain Offer

By Elizabeth Clampet

Many of those looking to take advantage of a Thursday promotion to register 
free domains were met with access denials blamed on a glitch in Network 
Solutions' registry. 
RegisterFREE.com was set up to register domain names free for one hour 
Thursday by NameEngine Inc. NameEngine is accredited by the International 
Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The promotion was done to 
promote the idea of free registration, said Anthony Van Couvering, president 
of NameEngine. 
He said that more than 100,000 people accessed the RegisterFREE.com site 
during the promotion, but because of problems with NSI's (NSOL) registry, 
only a few thousand were able to register domains for free. 
"We had a few problems looking up names and that slowed some things down for 
some people," Van Couvering said. "I feel bad about that, because I was 
hoping that everyone who came in would have the same fine experience as some 
people did." 
NSI spokesman Brian O'Shaughnessy confirmed that NSI's registry, which 
provides information on whether a domain is registered, experienced problems 
between 7:15 and 8:35 p.m. Eastern Thursday, but was fully operational when 
RegisterFREE's promotion began and 9 p.m. NSI is allowed four hours of "down 
time" per month, and O'Shaughnessy called the coincidence in times a "fluke." 
Although NameEngine is ICANN-accredited, its services are not yet functional. 
So for the promotion the company entrusted the technology of Tucows OpenSRS 
system to provide the actual registration. Tucows also provided special 
consulting and systems to support the promotion. Tucows paid NSI $6 for each 
registration, but its fee to NameEngine was not disclosed. 
Van Couvering said the problems it had with registration will not stop the 
company from offering a similar promotion in the near future. 
"I'm tremendously satisfied with all the response," he said. Domain names are 
a database transaction, and they ought to be free." 
"There are certainly some people who will sell you value-added-services, and 
maybe one wants to pay for them. I completely understand that and it's a very 
valid business model. But the domain name itself is not much more than a 
domain name, and the one you get from one (registrar) is the same as one you 
get from the other. It's becoming a commodity market." 
NSI's O'Shaughnessy disagreed, saying free doesn't always mean better. 
"It's all well and good to say that people want things free, but not 
everybody wants to drive a Yugo either," he said in defense of 
pay-for-registration services. "People are going to want to drive Jaguars, 
Mercedes, BMWs and Cadillacs." 
"Just because something's cheap doesn't make it good. We are also 
experimenting with our pricing and we began some initial experimentation over 
the last couple of months, and we will continue to do so as the marketplace 
changes."

                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
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