Re: "Too far out of the mainstream"

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 04:00:06PM -0600, Scott Marlowe wrote:

> One of the most fascinating things to come out of the whole Afilias
> winning the right to host the .org and .info domains was Oracle's PR
> response to the suggestion of using postgresql. Wish I could find it.

It was only the .org case.

The .org redelegation, more than the start up of .info, was quite
controversial. Nobody knew how much a new TLD was likely to make, but
at redelegation .org contained about 5 million domains. At $6.00 per
name per year wholesale (of which Afilias, as a vendor to PIR, took
only a part, I wish to emphasise), there was a non-trivial amount of
money involved in the operation of .org, so the bidding was pretty
heavy. Also, at the time it wasn't clear to anyone whether ICANN
would ever permit more labels in the root zone (now, of course, we
know that the plan is thousands of new domains. It's feast or famine
in the domain name industry ;-).

The Oracle stuff is all part of the archived public comments on the
ICANN site. You can find the whole sorry controversy here:
<http://forum.icann.org/org-eval/gartner-report/>. Oracle's
mouthpiece, Jenny Gelhausen, did seem to have conflated PostgreSQL and
MySQL in the remarks. I found particularly amusing the claim in those
remarks that Postgres was used primarily in the embedded market,
because of course Postgres has very frequently been attacked for its
resistance to proposed features that render it more suitable for the
embedded market.

The Gartner report itself was controversial: ISC, who also promised to
use PostgreSQL for its back end, got a lower grade on the back end
than did Afilias.

Anyway, this is all an amusing walk down memory lane. Thanks for the
reminder!

Best,

A

--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca