Re: [ga] Text of Letter to U.S. Commerce Dept. on ICANN Reform

[Gary Osbourne <gro@direct.ca>]

At 03:04 AM 03/08/02 +0200, Marc Schneiders wrote:

>I do, as I said. And I did. The point I tried to make,
>is that the description of the registries so much fits
>ICANN too. It means that in principle Lynn is able to
>see what he is doing. That is a start.

I said the same thing a couple of days ago on ICANNWatch,
only less briefly, and probably less well. Nevertheless
I reprint it here with minor editing:

M. Stuart Lynn is quoted in the article as stating:

"A registry by definition has a monopoly, so they
all have a common interest in preserving individual
monopolistic practices, so they don't want to be
accountable to anybody."

All a registry has a monopoly over is a TLD. That's
not much of a monopoly with about 260 TLDs out there.
Admittedly VeriSign has a huge chunk of the total
existing registrations with the .com TLD, and another
two big chunks wih .net and presently .org, and within
those TLDs can, and has, acted like a monopolist.

But wasn't one of the reasons for ICANN's existence
to increase competition? So they renegotiate with
VeriSign, in secret and without anyone else asking
them to, the .net agreement so that VeriSign remains
more of a monopoly. Then they complain that VeriSign
is a monopoly. ICANN also brings out new TLDs to
compete with VeriSign. What does it do? It takes
nearly forever to do so, brings out essentially a
total of two potential competitors, .biz and .info,
and handles the whole process rather spectacularily
badly. Then they complain that VeriSign is a monopoly.

Well, it was ICANN's task to lessen that monopoly,
they've done a terrible job to date (and one waits to
see how badly they can muck up the .org redelegation)
and now they complain that VeriSign is a monopoly.
It's hard to work up much sympathy for ICANN, this is
a bed of their own remaking.

Further, using ICP-3, also sprung on the internet
community without anyone asking for it, ICANN claims
control of the entire namespace. That is far more of
a monopoly. It is a monopoly of monopolies. Let's
take M. Stuart Lynn's statement and reword it a bit
and see if it fits:

"ICANN by definition has a monopoly, so they have
an interest in preserving monopolistic practices,
so they don't want to be accountable to anybody."

Sound like anyone you know? Much as I don't like
VeriSign, I am free to go and register in numerous
non-VeriSign TLDs. If I don't like ICANN, well I can
use a so-called alternate root, but their share of
that market is orders of magnitude lower than the
share of non-VeriSign TLDs in that market, so low
that most of them must also use most or all of
ICANN's root, and besides, ICANN with ICP-3
discourages their use, ICANN is even by
self-definition a monopoly. And if we go down a
level to IP numbers ICANN has a total monopoly. If
we should be concerned about monopoly TLDs behaving
badly, we should be far more concerned about ICANN
behaving badly. M. Stuart Lynn should really take
a look in the mirror. -g

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