RE: [ga] VeriSign May Ditch Domain Deal

[Mike Roberts <mmr@darwin.ptvy.ca.us>]

At 21:03 +0000 5/17/01, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
><snip>



>
>Outside of the limited timeframe that was intended for this 
>situation, it will constitute a bias.
>Seen in the long term, it will give the company that owns the 
>Registry *and* a Registrar a definitive competitive advantage. And 
>this simply because it gives the possibility to NSI/Verisign to plan 
>in advance common strategies between the R-y and the R-ar parts, to 
>make full use of synergies, to share know-how, and so on.
>The competitive advantage of NSI-the-Registrar over the other 
>testbed Registrars was not in the possibility of NSI-the-Registry 
>unfairly blocking other Registrars or unfairly privilege 
>NSI-the-Registrar (about which I will comment below), but in the 
>fact that NSI Registrar had already the knowledge of the 
>environment, operations and protocols that would have been put in 
>place, knowledge that the others did not have.
>
>This is a situation that cannot continue in the future. 
>Technological change, commercial/technical solutions, and what else, 
>can be put in place by Verisign-the-Registry after consultation (or 
>at least full awareness) of Verisign-the-Registrar, and here lies 
>the competitive advantage. This is why vertical integration has been 
>a no-no since the early days (as Director Kraaijenbrink put well in 
>MdR).

Roberto -  There are many TLDs with no separation between registry 
and registrar(s). There would be a great uproar around the world if 
ICANN even attempted to adopt a consensus policy that TLD registries 
could not include the registrar function.

So a black and white rule on separation is very unlikely to win 
approval.  If ICANN were to have a policy on registry-registrar 
separation, then the policy would have to have some elements of 
discrimination in it to deal with the circumstances when the 
community believes that lack of separation is damaging to other 
registrars and registry operators and to registrants.

As everyone knows from the length and complexity of the original 1999 
agreements, and of the proposed 2001 agreements, there is nothing 
simple about dealing with issues related to market dominance.  It's 
even harder to develop registry agreement language that would be 
acceptable to the operators and to the community at large.  Beyond 
that, such language would very likely run into national laws dealing 
with market dominance, as it has in this case, where both the 
competition directorate of the EC and the US DOJ have been taking a 
close look at the proposed new agreements.

So, bottom line, ICANN as a private sector consensus body should stay 
out of trying to either make or interpret competition law. 
Participants in the ICANN process can (and have) avail themselves of 
recourse to national competition bodies where needed.

- Mike


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