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Can someone explain to me what actually operating a registry means? I have always assumed that it basically consists of maintaining a database replicated across

Can someone explain to me what actually operating a registry means? I have always assumed that it basically consists of maintaining a database replicated across a few authoritative servers and handling WOIS information but this can't possibly warrant $25M of yeary expenses.

jessaustin 7y ago
Administration can consume any amount of money, so long as it isn't getting in the way of the money coming in the door. Just look at universities in USA. They're not doing anything now they weren't doing in 1980, yet tuition inflation was 7% over for most of the period since then. Where did the money go? They hired more assistant administrators, to justify higher salaries for the top administrators. Also the perks are pretty nice.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  I doubt even your numeric figure is exact; source? Anyway, supposing that it is - how do you know that's where the money went? And - how do you know the money went mostly to the same place in most universities? This sounds like a baseless generalization. PS - I'm not from the US.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    https://www.kansascityfed.org/publications/research/er/articles/2019/1q19bundick-pollard-rise-and-fall-college-tuition-inflation https://www.kansascityfed.org/publications/research/er/artic...
    - secabeen 7y ago
      The summary here has it all laid out: >They find that supply factors such as wages in the education sector and state appropriations to higher education both play important roles in explaining changes in college tuition inflation. In contrast, they find little evidence that demand factors such as changes in the availability of student loans have a significant effect on college tuition.
  - ambernightcruse 7y ago
    This is a pretty general assertion on the rising cost of college, and in the US it's commonly understood that there are a lot of extra admins, but not a lot of extra professors for students; mostly adjunct faculty and never-tenured instructors. Your experience wil vary depending on the public/private, size, department, etc. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...
- glofish 7y ago
  I have come to believe that the claim that administration increased dramatically is a myth. Take a university that provides decent statistics: http://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/university-factbook/employees http://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/university-factbook/employees click workflow trends. The workforce composition is virtually unchanged over the past 20 years.
  - secabeen 7y ago
    The Ed department has great data on this too: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.30.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.30.a... Expenditures in real per-student dollars are up, but at nothing like 7% a year. Tuition is up because of disinvestment by state legislatures: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main-reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m... Even there, net tuition actually paid by students at private schools is also largely flat, as while the nameplate tuition has gone up, few students pay that, as they get grants, financial aid, etc.: https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-net-price-sector-over-time https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/fig...
    - specialist 7y ago
      This is The Mostly Correct Answer. Cause & effect got obscured by compounding factors, including, but not limited to: privatizing student loans, grade inflation, ratcheting up credentials, glut of labor, artificially constraining supply, the textbook racket, the standardized testing racket, the academic publishing racket, the money chase for funding basic research, and others I'm sure I've forgotten. Source: Worked in higher ed.
toast0 7y ago
The technical pieces are running the authoritative NS servers for the tld (lots of sites, anycast, etc), running the whois servers (not so hard anymore, now that post GDPR, they don't return much), and running the registrar facing apis that interface with the live database. Administratively, I'm sure there's a rather enormous number of customer service requests to deal with from registrars and law enforcement/court orders. Also accounting related to the registrars. If they were running it themselves, $25M/year seems within reason to me. Affilias can probably do it for less, because they're running a bunch of tlds, so the capital costs of operating the registry are amortizable across all of them. However, PIR could have (and should have) bid that out occasionally, so I'd guess there isn't an obscene margin here.
wmf 7y ago
One thing I noticed in PIR's annual report is abuse. They take down thousands of domains per year due to court orders and all of those need to be reviewed by lawyers. That could be millions of dollars a year. You also need lots of lawyers just to keep up with what's going on in ICANN (which looks a lot like a full employment scheme for lawyers, lobbyists, and policy wonks). Then they spent over $1M on marketing. It adds up.

jessaustin 7y ago

Administration can consume any amount of money, so long as it isn't getting in the way of the money coming in the door. Just look at universities in USA. They're not doing anything now they weren't doing in 1980, yet tuition inflation was 7% over for most of the period since then. Where did the money go? They hired more assistant administrators, to justify higher salaries for the top administrators. Also the perks are pretty nice.

einpoklum 7y ago
I doubt even your numeric figure is exact; source? Anyway, supposing that it is - how do you know that's where the money went? And - how do you know the money went mostly to the same place in most universities? This sounds like a baseless generalization. PS - I'm not from the US.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  https://www.kansascityfed.org/publications/research/er/articles/2019/1q19bundick-pollard-rise-and-fall-college-tuition-inflation https://www.kansascityfed.org/publications/research/er/artic...
  - secabeen 7y ago
    The summary here has it all laid out: >They find that supply factors such as wages in the education sector and state appropriations to higher education both play important roles in explaining changes in college tuition inflation. In contrast, they find little evidence that demand factors such as changes in the availability of student loans have a significant effect on college tuition.
- ambernightcruse 7y ago
  This is a pretty general assertion on the rising cost of college, and in the US it's commonly understood that there are a lot of extra admins, but not a lot of extra professors for students; mostly adjunct faculty and never-tenured instructors. Your experience wil vary depending on the public/private, size, department, etc. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...
glofish 7y ago
I have come to believe that the claim that administration increased dramatically is a myth. Take a university that provides decent statistics: http://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/university-factbook/employees http://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/university-factbook/employees click workflow trends. The workforce composition is virtually unchanged over the past 20 years.
- secabeen 7y ago
  The Ed department has great data on this too: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.30.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.30.a... Expenditures in real per-student dollars are up, but at nothing like 7% a year. Tuition is up because of disinvestment by state legislatures: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main-reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m... Even there, net tuition actually paid by students at private schools is also largely flat, as while the nameplate tuition has gone up, few students pay that, as they get grants, financial aid, etc.: https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-net-price-sector-over-time https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/fig...
  - specialist 7y ago
    This is The Mostly Correct Answer. Cause & effect got obscured by compounding factors, including, but not limited to: privatizing student loans, grade inflation, ratcheting up credentials, glut of labor, artificially constraining supply, the textbook racket, the standardized testing racket, the academic publishing racket, the money chase for funding basic research, and others I'm sure I've forgotten. Source: Worked in higher ed.

toast0 7y ago

The technical pieces are running the authoritative NS servers for the tld (lots of sites, anycast, etc), running the whois servers (not so hard anymore, now that post GDPR, they don't return much), and running the registrar facing apis that interface with the live database. Administratively, I'm sure there's a rather enormous number of customer service requests to deal with from registrars and law enforcement/court orders. Also accounting related to the registrars. If they were running it themselves, $25M/year seems within reason to me. Affilias can probably do it for less, because they're running a bunch of tlds, so the capital costs of operating the registry are amortizable across all of them. However, PIR could have (and should have) bid that out occasionally, so I'd guess there isn't an obscene margin here.

wmf 7y ago

One thing I noticed in PIR's annual report is abuse. They take down thousands of domains per year due to court orders and all of those need to be reviewed by lawyers. That could be millions of dollars a year. You also need lots of lawyers just to keep up with what's going on in ICANN (which looks a lot like a full employment scheme for lawyers, lobbyists, and policy wonks). Then they spent over $1M on marketing. It adds up.