At 12:58 AM 20/07/2001 +1000, you wrote:
> > I think it's justified publicity - they are hosting the AUNIC servers for
>$0.00!
>
>But of course .. and I expect to see a zero dollar revenue amount against
>this zero dollar expenditure come next financial year.

This is $0 expenditure by auDA but significant expenditure by NetRegistry. 
We are not charging auDA for hosting the service but are are also supplying 
the equipment at out cost. This is two full systems - a production service 
(including RAID5 etc) and a fully redundant backup test facility.

Hoffy, if you wish to pay NetRegistry the $100k odd dollars that 
competitive tenders came in at, I will gladly remove the banners. I'm sorry 
that you are upset by this clearly commercial motive in us providing the 
service. I do however hope that you agree it is a far better service than 
was provided previously.

>Let's ask a few questions here
>
>1. Does hosting a service for a non-profit organization/company/whateveritis
>constitute a tax deduction?

Not sure - unfortunately no tax to deduct.

>2. Is it acceptable to download a page that is potentially 2~4 times the
>previous size at a cost to the end user.  The backbone providers must love
>NR.  I'm assuming NR has no outbound tariff.

AUNIC doesn't actually generate that much traffic. Also, the images are 
likely to be cached in proxies and are in any event very small.

>3. I still argue the point that the ads come from a different source than
>the page, and for a "critical technical function" (refer constitution 3.1 e.
>iii.) I fail to see any justification whatsoever for the ad.

The justification is that you just don't get the service without the ads. 
Your choice: would you prefer to have no AUNIC and no ads or AUNIC with 
ads, because those are the only two choices available (and one isn't really 
a choice, is it?)

I really can't see that its that bad a deal for the Australian community. 
If NetRegistry had not decided to carry the cost of AUNIC in this way, it 
would be added to the cost of .au domain names eventually as auDA would 
have had to pay for it somehow.


>Actually this argument is pointless.  The DNS of the world is fast becoming
>a battlefield of egocentric powerplays .. has noone thought of a better way
>yet ??  It's such an old system ...
>
>Hoffy


Larry Bloch
CEO
NetRegistry