MapleDots said:
Not sure if your count is accurate anymore because the guys from Sibername told me they purchased a bunch more threads.
Yes, as mentioned, it is a little trickier to count newly purchased TBR threads. However, the #'s mentioned were accurate until the rule changed. I believe that on or before Apr 17, 2019, MyID was the first registrar to start using the newly purchased TBR threads that did NOT require a new registrar. They quietly did this while other registrars seemed to ignore the idea of expanding.
Regarding the drop, based on reviewing the weekly results, CIRA does drop all domains at once (they can do this because there really aren't that many worth going after, relatively speaking), so this simply doesn't really overwhelm the servers. We can tell this because the best domains ALWAYS go first. If it was random drip of domains dropping, a top domain could go 10 minutes after the hour. But it doesn't ever happen that way.
We can also see that domains are registered in batches, every 5 minutes. So what is happening is that CIRA must have a rule that each TBR thread can only make 1 request, every five minutes. So every registrar uses every attempt, timed as best as possible for that 0:00 top of the hour. Then 5 minutes later, they're allowed to reuse the same TBR thread to try again for anything left over. Then another 5 minutes later, another shot is allowed, and this repeats until there are no requests left to make.
In October and November, both Sibername and MyID were starting to consolidate their TBR threads under one name, so it appears that as old registrar contracts expired, they let them expire, but then replaced them with new TBR threads under a single registrar name. By November, Sibername ceased to exist as a TBR registrar, all had been renamed to WHC. Also, MyID had consolidated all of theirs under 2 different names, MyID.ca Inc and Creative Pixels Inc, which seems to have included throwing a few extra in there for good measure. And that also helps explain at least some of the recent MyID dominance.
Here are the minimum current counts I'm 99% sure of:
MyID.ca Inc. (14 TBR threads)
Creative Pixels Inc. (14 TBR threads)
Web Hosting Canada (7081936 Canada Inc.) (19 TBR Threads)
So MyID has at least 28 combined under 2 active registrar names, WHC has at least 19, all under one name.
They are the only two consistent TBR players. MyID is still clearly being the most aggressive and it shows in the results, It looks like they have about 50% more TBR threads than WHC. Just to be clear though, these are the minimum numbers I can count for each based on weekly results.
TBR is like a game of beer pong. MyID is playing from 4 feet back (close servers, more ping-pong balls) WHC is playing from 6 feet back (further servers, and less balls). And all the other TBR's are chucking their balls at the cups from about 20 feet back. I think that's a good analogy on what's going on here.