[cetacea]

> Try approaching them and saying: Hi! I would like to reserve two billion DOIs :)

If you've already registered a prefix with them (say it's 10.8888), then you have an essentially unlimited namespace of possible suffixes for forming DOIs. Representing two billion DOIs requires only 6 suffix digits in base 36.

What exactly is so difficult about this?

[tejtm]

as I recall first they were excited, then calmer heads prevailed and pointed out it was orders of magnitude more DOIs than they had minted since the beginning of time and they were not prepared to make a sudden jump, but they could do a tiny fraction for several times our entire grants budget.

[cetacea]

I have no idea who "they" or "our" refers to, or what "sudden jump" you're talking about.

[tejtm]

Sorry, I have a bit of a cold so it all made sense to me. "They" were a DOI representative. "We" were a research team working on a grant involving persistent resolvable identifiers. the "sudden jump" would be the difference from how many DOIs they were responsible for resolving (in 2012) without any assigned to us v.s. to how many they would be responsible for if they did what we had asked.

[RRRA]

Aren't you paying around 1$ per new entry registered with them in your namespace?