Skeeve seys, 
> 1. Connect.com.au
>        - The currently admin the .net.au registry, and have for years.
> 	 I think they have done and EXCELLENT free job, and are doing a 
> 	 commercial quality job at the moment. They have the infrastructure,
> 	 the experience and the TRUST (VERY VERY VERY VERY IMPORTANT) of the
> 	 industry. They have PROVEN THEMSELVES to us that they can do a decent
> 	 job. They even deal with my annoying calls at times, and I dont pay
> 	 them anything... I, and Im sure any other ISP's would support 
> 	 connect.com.au performing such a role.. no.. I wonder if they are
> 	 Interested ;)
> 
> 2. ISOC-AU
>        - Well.... not up and running yet, but has the expertise to do so.
> 	 Geoff Houston (who runs .edu, .gov) is on the board, and also the
> 	 Secretary of the ISOC (big one). Connect.com are involved and so are
> 	 many other important people. I think they would be able to run a 
> 	 very reliable registry, which would also be trust worthy.
> 
> 	 Perhaps ISOC-AU and Connect.com could do it together? I know they 
> 	 represent the feeling of the ISP's and I for one will be joining
> 	 just before the AGM on November 27th 1996.

I'll just half butt in here for a second to make the small comment that
I read in The Age today that they (Melbourne IT) had cleared >2000 items
in the queue in six weeks or something, and they got 500 a week to do.
Now ISOC-AU is an organisation made up of people putting in their time
and goodwill, but not to spend hours adding DNS entries! :) As for connect -
I'd suggest that .net.au would be a lot smaller than .com.au and the
number of requests could likely be carried "on the side" by whoever does
them, but it is a major undertaking to do 500 dns entries per week. Trust
me we only have 2 class B's and 3 campuses and doing DNS for a subset of
that makes me want to throw sharp things at anyone who walks in my door
when I've just been given a new student lab to register :)

While I think the Melbourne IT pricing is way too much they *are* a money
making organisation and they do have to fund the salaries of however many
weenies they have doing the DNS setups. People, specially IT people cost
money. Sure, if they have some goodie user friendly system for registering
them that secretary types can run, well that would cost less to have a team
of people doing it, but I bet they don't.

Anyway it's just a thought that while ISOC-AU might be a good logical choice
to oversee the DNS for .com.au etc (not to mention .org.au, .net.au, .bofh.au
etc) it's not a trivial task, and it takes real effort/resources and hence
money to run this kind of thing.

OK, you can all shoot me down now. It's been a spam kind of a day..

Just my 2 cents.

-richard

-- 
  Richard A. Muirden, RMIT ITS Unix Snr Systems Admin: Web+News+Post -Master
mailto: richard§rmit.EDU.AU                   phone: 9660 3814, Fax: 9662 5652 
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                      http://www.rmit.edu.au/richard