1.	In response to "We Were Deleted", earlier today, from John Gilmore, gnu@toad.com..
2.	Dave, you've been fooled. Those companies are not competing with NSI. Those companies are competing to *send business* to NSI. The actual domain service will be provided by NSI. They cannot make NSI's service any better than the screwup you experienced this week; they can only make it worse.
3.	Under this scheme, the companies will handle the billing, but pay NSI $9 per year to provide the back-end database. From personal experience with CORE, which built one and operated it for months, I know the back-end database can be provided for well under $1-per-domain-per-year. NSI may make more money on the $9 domains than they do on the $35 domains, since billing costs probably eat a good chunk of the $35.
4.	Real competition that would improve your service and/or make NSI accountable (you could take your business elsewhere) would involve either, whole new domains other than .com, which NSI would have no role at all in administering; or a shared process to create the .com domain database daily, which would not place NSI at the center of that process.
5.	I hear that ICANN is working their way toward something like this (probably the first sooner than the second), but it's a very slow process. And they're likely to make a few more misleading announcements that "real competition has arrived" long before it actually does.