You wanna make a cool $5.5

million off this whole Internet

frenzy? How about $5.5 mil

guaranteed annually, with

another $24 mil as a safe yearly

income estimate?

Well, if you happen to own a part

of Network Solutions Inc., you may

have just gotten a piece of the

action:

As if it weren't already bad

enough that all the good domains

were taken, now you'll have to

shell out bank for the staid

sobriquets that remain. (And

don't go thinking they're gonna

start giving away winners like

criminal.edu and colostomy.org

just because they've started

charging for 'em...)

We all knew some sort of user fee

was coming, but, frankly, we

never anticipated $100 per new

domain and a $50 annual renewal.

Call us stupid, but we expected

the fees to have some relation

to the actual cost of

registering domains and running

a dozen or so root servers.

We've got to admit, though, the

detailed Q&A of the press

release shows a fair amount of

net.savvy not displayed by

the likes of, say, the

CompuServe-Unisys announcement

of recent memory. Now, we don't

want to perform a detailed

point-by-point analysis of the

press release along the lines of

a Hoffman/Novak piece - we

understand our audience a little

better than that - but allow us

$5 a month may be fair enough,

until we remember the $100 fee

for new registrations. That's

still less than $9 a month,

which is about the cost of a

single movie ticket in this

town, but NSI's unique sleight

involves substituting the

concession stand (where the easy

profits are to be had) for the

Um, this is nice, but, according

to our estimates, it doesn't

take anywhere near $5.5 million

to throw up a Web server with a

fill-in form and a Perl script

behind it to parse for the likes

of mcdonalds.com or fuck.com and

dump the registration into the

whois database. (And, as we

learned yesterday, if they used

a Netscape Commerce Server,

they'd probably even get a spot

on the Netscape "What's Cool"

page - gratis!) Popcorn and

Swizzlers, anyone?

Now, on top of the annual $50

renewal fees NSI will be

collecting on the 100,000+

domains already in existence, add

another $24 mil per year based

on the current rate of 20,000

new domains registered each

month - it's hard not to be left

with the impression that these

jokers are the real

mozillionaires.

Even if NSI doesn't automate and

instead goes hog-wild and

doubles its whopping ten-person

domain registration staff, adds

a bunch of new machines, and

pays for some snazzy new

stationery, we're still talking

about a serious chunk of

"walking-around-money" (and

nobody needs that much

exercise).

And these are the folks that came

out on top of a competitive

bidding process? Man, this

subversive propaganda gig blows!

We'd wait until the contract

expires in 1998 to get in on this

govt. contract action, but it

appears as if it doesn't expire.

Shit.

JUST IN: It seems NSI caught wind

of this rather pesky emerging

controversy, and decided to

preemptively rush its statement,

moving the release date from 8

A.M. September 18 to 6 A.M.

September 13 - posted complete

with unanswered FAQ questions,

non-ISO Latin 1 characters in its

HTML, and impossible "last updated"

dates. So much for that "Oklahoma

land rush of registrations" we were

hoping to spearhead. [And our handy

fill-in form for automatic domain

registration was half complete -

Dunderhead]