Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons: Acceptable Use of the Public Registry

This seems the wrong approach; it creates extra work for the operators of the registry, and indeed the notice says that the operators are willing to give valuable professional services for free to those large users who are consuming the common resource.

Why not just say that if use of the registry exceeds the (very generous) threshold, a bill will be issued and the money can be split between providing more resources for the registry and some sort of bonus for the maintainers? The firms abusing the resource (albeit negligently rather than maliciously) control vast wealth and yet none of them have put their hand in the pocket because they don't wish other large firms to free ride upon their generosity.

Perhaps the objection will be that it's supposed to be a completely free registry for anyone and charging would go against the spirit of the whole thing. Nonsense. They are taking something for nothing while operating their own commercial services on wholly different principles. It's fine to impose commercial terms on commercial users. Part of why they are using the public registry rather than setting up their own is to advertise and socialize to the benefit of their commercial operation.

The 'tragedy of the commons' is often portrayed as a problem of human nature, in which everyone taking a little bit gradually erodes the whole without it really being anyone's fault, and thus justifying the establishment of market mechanisms instead (there's an interesting historical background to this idea showing that it's a somewhat reactionary concept, but let's skip over that). What we're seeing here is not the result of too many small users gradually overwhelming the whole, but a small number of large users blithely exploiting it. Make them pay, and if they whine about it just cut off their access - in other words, treat them as they treat others.