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RE: [ga] VeriSign May Ditch Domain Dea


 
[Note: Dumb butt strikes again. It seems that if you make the lines too short, the curve-around or
whatever it's called is not triggered, there's no scroll bar, and I can't even read the full length of my own dingbat email. So I'm sending it again, scroll bar visible before my eyes, with apologies to those who were able to read the thing. WSL]
 
The bloody SPAM is enough by itself. And as an attorney, I know how "Chinese walls" work -- they don't.  How it was that "marketing" ever got into the purely technical issue of running a root and recording domain name registrations is beyond me, except for the fact that NSI has NEVER done anything without first thought to its bottom line.
The "examples" pertinent to this issue itself  are of course within the walls of Verisign, so I would invite you to provide any examples which show that anything I have suggested is not true.  Hawking and registering domain names is a marketing function, with a bit of techno-bit twiddling attached;
running a registry of who has registered what so that the DNS function can be authoritatively carried out is pure techno-bookkeeping, and should never be found in the same basket as marketing. They are philosophically different functions that have an inherent conflict of interest, and any mix of them is quite anti-competitive in that every registration then ultimately ends up with the registry, thereby giving that registry an unfair advantage in its own hawking efforts if it is permitted then to tout its own registration services as to every conceivable variation of a "hot" name, which Verisign (and, e.g.,
register.com, but you see register.com does not have the whole pile as does Verisign) does interminably.  I am not an antitrust lawyer, but I've studied it, and I was not born yesterday.

Rumor has it that Verisign has also tracked WHOIS queries, and when one looks like a "hot" one (read "marketable") it has immediately snatched it up for itself, and although this also seems to be the practice in a lot of other places, a look at the domain names that Verisign/NSI has registered to itself would make it among the biggest, if not the biggest, cybersquatter on the net (were it not for the loophole in the law that exempts registrars from that law -- a loophole about which I would like to know -- and intend to find out -- just how much Verisign/NSI had a hand in getting into that abominable law.

Chuck, no one out here with half a brain can fail to figure out what Verisign/NSI -- of whom I am forced against my will to be a customer if I'm to have a domain name -- does. Verisign/NSI past practices have, I suspect, conditioned a good bit of the public to accept at once the idea that Verisign/NSI would in fact be carrying out exactly what I've said. And thank you for the email; it has moved me to respond, and suggested that, since this issue is before the Congress right now, I should immediately copy this whole thing off to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), so excuse me while I take care of that chore. Maybe that will help put an end to this farce.

Bill Lovell
 

"Gomes, Chuck" wrote:

Bill,Please give me an example that proves that the current separation between Registry and Registrar does not work.Chuck
-----Original Message-----
From: William S. Lovell [mailto:wsl@cerebalaw.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2001 12:43 PM
To: Bruce James
Cc: GA
Subject: Re: [ga] VeriSign May Ditch Domain Deal
Well, let's hope so.  To begin with, paper work "separation" between registry and registrar
functions has always been a gross fiction -- it never works and should never have been
contemplated. What do you think happens when the registry type says to the registrar type,
"Let's do lunch?" I never deal directly with NSI (Verisign) in registering a domain name,
but only when the necessary paper work trickles out of my registration application to some
other registrar.

Even so, I guess that makes me a "customer" of Verisign and gives them a crack in the law
that allows them to send me their SPAM. That's one reason why there's an incompatibility
between registry and registrar functions -- registries should twiddle bits, and that's all --
a registry should be hawking nothing. (For our nonUSA people to whom the slang term
"hawking" is not familiar, it just means aggressive marketing and that sort of thing.)

(Once our current more important issues get resolved, SPAM, privacy, security, etc., will
be my next projects.)

(The concession in par. 2 below solves nothing as to the problem in par. 1.)

Bill Lovell

Bruce James wrote:

""The major sticking point arose from a letter that the Justice Department sent to the Department of Commerce warning that the deal would harm competition in the nascent business of registering Internet names, people familiar with the negotiations said. The letter opposed the so-called vertical integration of VeriSign's managing of the ".com" database and registering new names in the database, sources said.""

""Commerce officials were said to be asking for more concessions from VeriSign, such as giving up control of the ".net" domain sooner than 2005.""
 
 

/Bruce

----- Original Message -----
To: GA
Sent: May 16, 2001 07:46
Subject: [ga] VeriSign May Ditch Domain Deal
VeriSign May Ditch Domain Deal

May 15 2001 04:57 PM PDT

The Commerce Department's review of the agreement that extends the computer security firm's control of the '.com' domain has the company thinking twice, sources say.

MORE at:

http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,24500,00.html
 
 

/Bruce
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 

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