[ga] Planning for 2007 -- ICANN negotiations over .com wholesale pricing

[George Kirikos <gkirikos@yahoo.com>]

Hello,

Verisign has a stranglehold over the .com registry until 2007. However,
at some point, probably sooner than we expect, negotiations will take
place to renew that contract. Given how we've seen how ICANN has
bungled previous negotiations, I think it's important that consensus
principles be put in place by the community well in advance (i.e. we
should start now, and pass any necessary resolutions/votes), so that
the Board has no doubt what is acceptable and what is not in future
negotiations, to force it to comply with certain standards.

I believe Tucows/OpenSRS has already stated that they'd be happy to
take over the registry at a wholesale price of $2/name-year, which is
much lower than the current $6/name-year realized by Verisign. Other
parties, if offered the opportunity, might be able to do similar or
better pricing. Lower wholesale pricing of registrations would provide
huge consumer benefits, as the savings by registrars are passed on to
consumers. Registrars themselves would probably also benefit, due to
increased volumes from the new lower prices they can offer.

Thus, maximization of competition for the contract over operation of
the .com registry, in order to provide consumer benefits, should be one
of the cornerstone principles, in my view. Is there a consensus for
this?

How can this be accomplished? I think one obvious way is to prepare, at
an early stage (years in advance), performance and technical standards
for the .com registry (these might already be in place, i.e. for
Verisign. Thus, companies who are interested in operating the .com
registry can begin the process now of achieving or beating those
standards.

I think another important thing to do would be to widely promote those
standards, and invite companies that are interested in competing with
Verisign for the .com registry to begin a dialogue with ICANN, via a
special public discussion list, or other public means (so as not to
advantage any one party, and to enhance transparency) early. I'm sure
many of us can identify parties who'd be interested in operation of the
registry (e.g. possibly other registry operators, Oracle, IBM, Dun &
Bradstreet, Sun, Yahoo, Amazon.com, AOL, EDS, etc.) Perhaps even
consortiums of companies would emerge to create best-of-breed
solutions, if they had early enough notice of the opportunity.

This is a starting point....hopefully some creative brainstorming will
lead us to a document that can be voted upon at some point, to give the
Board proper direction. Otherwise, we're apt to see the Board presented
with a 'done deal' one day, negotiated behind closed-doors, which might
not be in the community's best interests.

Putting things to a 'vote' in the Names Council/GNSO eventually, I
think we might even get unanimity over these principles (the only
constituency that might be against competition in the .com registry is
the gTLD constituency, but I don't think Verisign has a majority of the
votes there; even then, they'd likely have to abstain).

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
http://www.Kirikos.com/
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