Its great that google is open sourcing this, however, its a bit curious as anyone who is going to be operating a registry really has the resources and expertise to manage this kind of thing (both hw and sw). Unless the end game is to get big resource users (like registries) onto GCE, its a bit odd.
It is a bit odd, but I have friends in African countries with TLDs that need to be registered via paper forms / GPG-signed emails only.
This move by Google just massively simplified the barriers to entry for small countries running their own ccTLDs in a more modern way.
(I work for a registrar, dealing with ccTLD idiosyncracies all day. If more registries adopt common premium price extensions, etc, it will make my life a lot easier, too.)
We support downloadable static premium price lists too (it's all that some registrars can handle), but yes, obviously we prefer the price extension too. Here's the entry point into the static premium pricing lists if you're curious: https://github.com/google/nomulus/blob/master/java/google/re...
By the way, can I just say as an aside, that it's so awesome that I can finally link to and discuss our code in the open (I wrote this pricing stuff under stuff).
I work for a registrar as well. You are right, I hadn't considered ccTLD's What I find really insidious about ccTLD registries is the crazy rules they have (and therefore the crazy business rules I must use to support them) this doesn't fix that, but as you pointed out it might help some of those small ones that are otherwise out of luck.
Well, unlike gTLDs, ICANN have no control over what ccTLD registries do. Personally, I much prefer dealing with ccTLD registries who behave like gTLD registries (.me, .co, &c.), but those are few and far between.
Smaller ccTLDs are unlikely to use this though: it makes more sense for them to contract out the technical side of things than run their own, with .cm being an example of a registry that shouldn't run their own infrastructure.
Incidentally I find that to be a smart business move for them as well. I mean if you behave like a gTLD you integrate much faster than say .es where you have all kinds of offset rules you must apply to their expiration or .nl who give you a one day window to renew!
You'd think that, but trying to convince registries to go down that route is head wrecking.
And then you have the likes of the .ie domain registry (IEDR) who use their own vaguely EPP-like protocol that works nothing like normal registries with a set of needlessly bizarre policies specific to them.
There's one big obvious advantage of open source registries, from the perspective of registrars: You can look at our source code and figure out exactly what we're doing.
Not in practice, the reality is most of the new gTLD's went shopping for industry people - you have to, there are so many unique technical, regulatory, and industry specific items you just buy the expertise, trying to learn on the fly is a monumental task.
Can we imagine new gTLD Entrepreneurs with a minimum technical knowlege to become their own back-end Registry AND Registry in round 2 of the ICANN new gTLD program?
OTOH, one of the justifications for why domains cost $7 instead of $2 is all the quadruple-redundant Oracle databases and such that Verisign uses. If a registry can be built cheaper it argues for lower prices.
I disagree. The com/net zone is 144mm records, thats about a billion dollars per year in revenue. The technical requirements to store 144mm records with metadata and have multiple redundancy, backup datacenter failover etc. does not come close to that in costs even if those costs are 10%. The cost is completely divoriced from the technical requirements, its simply what the market bears and is use to. They have momentum on their side.
Some of the new tld's are very inexpensive right now, but that is only the short term business model to get market share. Their renewal prices are often higher and will stay that way.
That is the goal. This runs on App Engine, Google's PAAS, if the Java lock-in is anything like the Python lock-in I have experienced this won't be very useful outside of their infrastructure. At least not without a major rewrite.
