[registrars] The Iron Fist of Iron Mountain;-(

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

Robert F. Connelly wrote:

> If this the kind of stupidity we can expect from Iron Mountain in 
> perpetuity, they will be able to make registrars lives a living hell.  
> Can someone please tell me how else I can handle the Escrow requirements?
Back when Zupke asked me to assist on escrow I opined that "we should be 
generous in what we accept", in order to make adoption of escrow easy. 
Obviously I lost that one to the "we will require X" school of thought.

I also opined that to be useful to non-defunct registrars, the escrow 
should address business continuity problems. Suppose all those rare 
earth elemental names that Tim's been sequestering away somewhere in 
Arizona go critical, or yet another tropical depression makes landfall 
in Miami, and some registrar is looking at days-to-weeks before the 
glowing goo or non-glowing muck is squeegeed out of his or her rackspace 
and the phones go live again.  From a note in the exchange of notes 
between myself and Dave Piscitello and Steve Crocker re: SSAC025 shortly 
after New Delhi:

    /If this were the registrar escrow problem I'd want registrars to
    want in, because it meets their fire/flood/power/partition/theft
    scenarios, and escrow helps them operationally, and because it meets
    their business/legal/regulatory pro forma, and keeps them from
    having to either build out a second set of boxen, or run naked on a
    single failure thread. Something on the order of "there is a spare
    set of boxes in the closet-in-the-cloud, and if you flush data to
    them daily, the day you can't [insert unavoided event here] is the
    day you can move into the closet-in-the-cloud and start your
    facilities recovery clock"
    /

So the question for one or more registrars is the pro forma exercise 
Zupke settled on, which gets ICANN out of your hair while you live, and 
after you're dead and gone the way of RegisterFly, what do you care if 
the data is junk, it is someone else's business opportunity, or do you 
want something else, possibly because you'd like a crack at explaining 
to registrants, resellers, and shareholders, that your escrow and 
business continuity is integrated, and you don't just escrow your EPP 
payload bits, you escrow all of your bits.

Obviously, this isn't something I'd expect the bigger registrars to jump 
on, but further on down the volume curve it may look reasonable.

Cheers,
Eric
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