Re: [ga] VeriSign May Ditch Domain Deal

["William S. Lovell" <wsl@cerebalaw.com>]

Roeland Meyer wrote:

> From: William S. Lovell [mailto:wsl@cerebalaw.com]
> Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2001 10:21 AM

> One of these is the "one-stop-shopping" mentality.  "If it is
> known that
> Company X is going to be the registry for your domain name, why go
> elsewhere for anything?"

I confess, this is exactly why MHSC domains are still with NSI. My last
experience was rather pleasant, I paid the tariff and they performed the
service.

So if registrar X ran its own registry, as I discuss below, then at least
that one-stop-shopping mentality would lie with all such registrars,
rather
than being monopolized by Verisign -- the Verisign/ICANN agreement
is and will continue to be anti-competitive.

> Another is the recent Verisign/ICANN
> agreement -- the whole thing has been publicized so much that whole
> world will get the sense that "Verisign is where the action
> is," and "if I want something I'd better go to them."

It might get investors to buy into their stock offering more.

Pretty good, Roeland! Verisign stock (whatever their symbol is)
skyrocketed! Don't we all realize that the investing public, and
particularly the high level investors, can recognize a monopoly
when they see one and hence know where the profits will be?

But, I really
wonder if it is doing anything to their (already huge) market-share.
Remember, they [still] have 100% of COM/NET/ORG and they have an excellent
channel market distribution system. Discussions about market share, between
channel-market partners (registrars), are not constructive or germaine.

BTW, new TLDs that sub-contract with the NSI registry are also
non-competitive. This is mere window-dressing, like the registrar system.
What the Internet needs are multiple registries, of all sizes.

So here's where the ignorance of this feller right here writing this thing
(and
he has more than enough to go around, let me assure you!) comes to
the
fore.  As I said, I started out in "one registry, one registrar,"
etc. mode. My
pea brain has accepted and indeed embraced the multiple registrar concept.
But I'm stuck on how there can really be multiple registries. Wouldn't
that
be an information logistics problem? Would each registrar run its own
registry and that's it, with no interconnection and no central data
base (as
I'm told the WHOISs are now done)? If there were a relationship such
that
Registrar A only handles one TLD, and Registrar B handles another one,
the fact that the same character string xxx were put to the left of
the dot
by both would present no problem, e.g., one of them would be xxx.net
and
the other xxx.org -- no collision.  But that's not the case. 
What if two
registrars sign up xxx.com and enter them into their own registry and
the
two registrars never talk to each other or to some central point about
what they have done?

I understand the term "root level" to mean one central registry where all
data from all registrars are entered -- I've understood that that registry
is in fact set up on the "A" server sitting deep in the innards of NSI -- it
was and remains the registry. If other registrars set up their own registries
for what they do, those would not be "root level" registries, but something
else. But would they not have to keep updating the root registry in order
for the whole system not to crash? Maybe I don't even know what a
registry is, huh? To learn stuff, you gotta ask questions (a poor takeoff
on Yogi Berra), and I'm asking.

The new TLDs
were supposed to do this, but the ICANN didn't make this distinction in the
process, last November. IMHO, it should have.

Maybe, what the ICANN needs is to define what a root level registry is, how
it operates, and what the policies are, first?

Yeah! And then tell me! :-)
> I hate to appear to be
> pounding the same drum here. But, had this been in place before November,
> we
> might have a better defense for 1) the selection that were made, 2)
> the
> selection process itself, and 3) a clearer road to implementation of
> the
> [ICANN] business objectives. Such suggestions were made
> <http://www.dnso.net/mhsc-tld.htm>,
> but ICANN seems to prefer stumbling
> about in the dark.
I'll ditto that.  ICANN goes off half cocked all the time, even though
it has at hand
a bunch of SOs that in fact have the expertise to keep ICANN
on track. It does
not use that expertise for at least one simple reason: the background
of its high
echelon is all multi-B corporate, "we on the Board do what we think
best and to
hell with the stockholders," without fully grasping (and may never
grasp) the concept
that ICANN is not for-profit (the only kind the Board knows) but public
interest,
and it is required to act in that public interest.  That means
first listening to the public,
and I refer there to policy type things. (The difference is, a business
corporate director
can often say, "no ignorant twit out there is going to tell me how
to run this company,"
and having been at stockholder's meetings and heard what some such
ignorant twits
can come up with, I can report that such an attitude is not without
justification; but on
the other hand, such an attitude within a public interest corporation
is precluded by
definition.) But it is equally important in a case like this where
the "lab bench expertise"
actually required to do the job does not lie within the upper executive
levels (whatever
might have been there in the past as to certain people seems to have
dwindled away,
the way things are going -- no more proof of that proposition is needed
than what
we are looking at right now), but rather lays amidst  all us GA
peons.

On that subject, you can surely take it that I do not count myself as one who has
any of that particular expertise! Those who do have such expertise have the same
kind of duty here, methinks, as does the Board and so one: the experts have to
lead the ignorant such as myself to understand the issues on which decisions have
to be made, if this whole thing is to work, and I must say that numbers of you have
done precisely that, either right out in public on the list or privately, and for that you
sure have my thanks!

Good show, Roeland!

Bill Lovell