] >>>>>application when the relevant credit is established. Personal cheques
] >>>>>are therefore not recommended, because they can take up to seven working
] >>>>>days to be cleared by the banks. 
] 
] 
] Melbourne IT is a new organisation that has grown out of the academic world
] with little or no commercial experience.  This is quite evident from the
] imposed commercial terms and conditions. They may well modify the
] accounting conditions if sufficient complaints are made to them.
] Alternatively people will get used to the system and eventually accept it
] as the cost of obtaining a com.au name.  In time, more name registeries
] will be available and no doubt offer different terms and conditions and
] perhaps because of Melbourne IT's current policy this may happen sooner
] than later.

To be fair to Melbourne IT, it was suggested (I think at the DNS meeting
in Melbourne) that the reason for Melbourne IT wanting to enter into the
agreements with Participating ISPs was so that Melbourne IT could minimise
the financial overheads they would incur.

Things like tracking whether cheques have bounced and if so backing out
domains, generating invoices, tracking whether customers have paid yet;
these all require administrative personnel to manage.  If Melbourne IT
can minimise expenditure on administration, then this can help keep down
the level of over-servicing, and hopefully the cost per domain.

Note that the Participating ISPs, despite the name, could be any agent
willing to fill the role regardless of whether they supply Internet
access to anybody.

I can envisage a company who is interested in accounting and financial
stuff setting up as a PISP, interacting with the customer by sending
invoices (maybe 14 days terms) with a 10% margin, and interacting with
Melbourne IT by sending cheques to Melbourne IT every week to keep their
balance healthy and sending the registration forms to Melbourne verbatim.

This PISP then has to deal with customers who don't pay invoices on time,
cheques that bounce, and all that stuff, leaving Melbourne IT to concentrate
on the technical side.  The PISP accepts the risk of having bad debts, but
this should be covered by the margin (eg: PISP charges customer $110 on 14
days terms and Melbourne IT subtracts $100 from PISP's account immediately).

Larger ISPs will already have this sort of administrative infrastructure
in place so that they can bill clients for Internet Services, so one would
hope they could do the same thing for their customers as above (add a small
margin for processing and risk, but allow flexibility in payment terms).

By all means attack Melbourne IT for the level of charges they propose for
domain renewals, especially if they are going to have a monopoly.  But let's
not get distracted from the issues by whinges about payment methods please.
__________________________________________________________________________
David Keegel <djk&#167;cyber.com.au>  http://www.cyber.com.au/  +61 3 9642-5997
Cybersource P/L: Unix Systems Administration and TCP/IP network management