RE: $200 million (was [ga] Draft Resolution)

["Gomes, Chuck" <cgomes@verisign.com>]

Let me first of all reiterate what I just said in a response to Michael
Froomkin: :  "Under the existing agreement, there is a commitment for $0.
Under the new agreements, there is a commitment for $200M."

I'm not sure what you mean Dave when you say that the draft agreement only
refers to .com.  There are three draft agreements, one for .com, one for
.net and one for .org.  Under the three new agreements, the VeriSign
Registry would be involved in all three TLDs for differing amounts of time
and in the case of .org, the agreement specifically allows for continuing
use of some of our infrastructure after we are no longer the registry.

The $200M commitment was not made for "registry services in general" but to
research and development and infrastructure.  Increased assurance that we
will continue as the registry for .com puts us into a situation where it
makes more business sense to increase our investment in R&D and
infrastructure.  Such investment will directly benefit the .org and .net
registries while we are still associated with them and will also potentially
benefit the .org and .net registries under other organizations' control as
well as other registries if they elect to take advantage of the
infrastructure we build.  With regard to R&D, increased investment there
would be expected to benefit the Internet community as a whole.

Chuck (Post # 3, 21 Mar 2001)

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Dave Crocker [mailto:dhc2@dcrocker.net] 
Sent:	Monday, March 19, 2001 3:17 PM
To:	Gomes, Chuck
Cc:	'Elisabeth Porteneuve'; david@farrar.com; ga@dnso.org
Subject:	RE: $200 million (was [ga] Draft Resolution)

At 07:12 AM 3/19/2001, Gomes, Chuck wrote:
>It is a commitment to invest at least $200M total in R&D and infrastructure
>improvements to improve the .com, .net and .org registries over 10 years.
>Part of that would be used to improve the com/net/org gTLD zone server
>constellation which would be made available to the new .org registry for
one
>year for free and beyond that at terms to be determined later.  Also, other
>registries would be allowed access to that constellation and thereby take
>advantage of by far the best zone server constellation available.claz

Chuck,

US$200M is such an impressive number, it is worth being very clear about 
the nature of the real expenses.  That requires a) answering Elizabeth's 
query more completely, and b) clarifying what the monies will be applied 
to.  US$20/year will buy one heck of a lot of infrastructure.

Note that Elizabeth asked whether this expenditure would be IN ADDITION to 
planned Verisign "R&D" expenses.

Note that it is even possible to list basic co-location and connectivity 
expenses under the language for R&D that is present.

Absent your providing clarifying language, this piece of the agreement 
appears to say no more than:

a) Verisign will spend at least US$20/year, for 10 years, to pay for 
registry hardware, software, connectivity and operations; and

b) This infrastructure will be made available to com, net and org.

A skeptic might suspect that the US$20M/year number is simply a low number 
for the expenditures that Verisign would be required to run the service; if 
there is anything unusual or incremental about this commitment, it is not 
clear what.


Points of continuing confusion:

1. The draft agreement refers only to com, while the letter refers to com, 
net and org;

2. The distinction between applying to money to "registry" services in 
general, versus specific access functions such as DNS and whois, is not 
clarified.

d/

----------
Dave Crocker   <mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking   <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel: +1.408.246.8253;   fax: +1.408.273.6464
--
This message was passed to you via the ga@dnso.org list.
Send mail to majordomo@dnso.org to unsubscribe
("unsubscribe ga" in the body of the message).
Archives at http://www.dnso.org/archives.html