Re: [ga] Re: Board descisions

[Jonathan Weinberg <weinberg@mail.msen.com>]

At 03:00 AM 3/12/2001 +0100, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
>Personally, I prefer the old contract.
>I believe that the separation between Registrar and Registry (or, rather, 
>to keep the principle of the separation) will be more beneficial than the 
>reassignment of .org.
>The reassignment of .org is just a matter of "quantity", i.e. it reduces 
>(of a quantity of which the significancy is doubtful) the overall market 
>share of Verisign, while the current contract aims at changing the quality 
>of the presence, i.e. prevent contemporary presence at the Registry and 
>Registrar level for the same TLD.
>This was, BTW, one of the basic principles of the contract, and to abandon 
>this is a major change that has to be discussed.
 >[snip]

         I believe that the proposed revisions cannot be approved by April 
1 if there is to be anything left of the notion that ICANN is a bottom-up 
organization.  But if I were to speak to the merits, I would agree with 
Roberto.  One of the reasons that the proposals have so conspicuously 
failed to win community support is that the arguments made in their favor 
are so implausible.  Maintaining the .com and .net registries together with 
the dominant registrar has plain anticompetitive potential; the fact that 
there are now independent registrars with their own market share is not 
itself a reason to abandon a procompetitive divestiture.  ICANN staff have 
urged that the benefit to this transaction lies in making the Verisign 
registry contract look like the proposed new TLD registry contracts, but 
they have not explained why (other than on esthetic grounds) we should view 
that congruence as overridingly important.  Nor does the procompetitive 
benefit, if any, of causing Verisign to spin off .org begin to outweigh the 
disadvantages the contract would bring.

Jon


Jonathan Weinberg
co-chair, Working Group C
Professor of Law, Wayne State University
weinberg@msen.com

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