The EURid Registry responds.
On Tuesday, Patrik Linden the spokesman for the EURid Registry responded to my allegations of the registry’s gross mishandling of the .EU Landrush. Mr. Linden said my description of the Landrush process was not accurate and that the EURid registry did validate that all registrars accredited to sell .EU were legal entities.

A bit of background.
This is the third in a series of articles I’ve written about the gross mishandling of the .EU domain name Landrush that took place beginning on April 7th. The problems started because the registry was incredibly lax with who it accepted to be accredited as .EU registrars. Most “legal entities” that wound up being accredited were phantoms set up by savvy operators. They were used to game the Landrush process to get the really valuable names. As a result “everyday” Europeans were pushed out of the process and will undoubtedly be forced to pay exorbitant prices to “middlemen” who gamed the system.

He was correct about one thing.
Mr. Linden was correct that my description of the mechanics of the Landrush process was an oversimplification, and therefore not entirely accurate. That said, the end result is still the same – maybe a little worse. The more registrars any organization had trying to get a valuable name, the more likely that organization is to get the name.

Remember the New York Phantoms?
In yesterday’s blog article I described a group of registrars I called the New York Phantoms. This is a group of 400 registrars that were accredited by EURid; none of which have websites, all of which are Delaware LLC’s and all of which have the same registered agent. You can be sure having these 400 registrars working together to get a name gives them a considerable advantage over those registrars who are actually in the business.

For the record and so you might understand how the process actually works, here’s a more accurate description of the process:

1. Each accredited registrar could designate up to five I.P. (i.e. Internet Protocol) addresses with which to connect to the registry.
2. Despite the fact that there were five available addresses per registrar, most registrars were able to connect to the registry only once per second. However depending upon the activity at that split second, the registrar could be lucky and connect up to five times, or unlucky and not connect at all.
3. After connecting and making a request for a domain name, whether the registrar was successful or not, the registrar was forced to disconnect and attempt to reconnect again.

The process is different. The result is the same.
While the above process is different than the queue process I described in my earlier article – connecting then dropping the connection and then attempting to connect again has about the same effect — if a group, like the 400 New York Phantoms, are attempting to grab high value names, they have a significantly greater chance of getting that name than any single legitimate registrar.

A single registrar got five connections.
Think about it, the legitimate registrar will attempt to connect and issue requests with its five connections – which it must constantly give up – and then attempt to re-establish.

Large phantom groups get thousands of connections.
The New York Phantoms, in turn, will attempt to connect and issue requests with their 2000 (5 X 400 = 2000) connections. Because of their vast number of connections, they pretty much are always connected.

I think it’s worse than I described earlier.
So you see, Mr. Linden is correct. The actual technical process is somewhat different than the simplified scenario I described earlier. When you think about it, the actual process probably favors those gaming the system more than I described. Thank you, Mr. Linden.

Mr. Linden’s amazing claim.
Finally, Mr. Linden seemed proud that the EURid registry verified that each applicant was a legal entity before it was accredited. Take a moment and think about what that means. You can form a “legal entity” for $50 – an LLC – and you are good to go. Is that what we want a registry to do? Don’t we want them instead to make sure that the organization it allows to provide end-users with its domain names – especially Europe’s very own domain name – are actually in the domain name registration business?

Registrars without websites?
EURid accredited more than 580 phantom registrars who do not even have websites How is it possible for a company that doesn’t have a website to be in the domain name registration business? So let’s back up a bit. The hard fact is that the EURid registry verified one thing and one thing only. The EURid registry verified that for every registrar application there was a check for 10,000 eurors ($12,000 U.S.) to deposit into the EURid bank account.

The gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
The very fact that Mr. Linden takes refuge in saying that the EURid Registry verified that all registrars were legal entities, tells us how incredibly inept Europe’s very own registry happens to be.

It seems like nothing is going to be done.
I continue to wonder if the European commission is going to take any action here. My guess is they won’t, but who knows I could be wrong. As Journalist Linda Ellerbee would say, “And So It Goes…”