Re: [wg-c] There is no "consensus"

[Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>]

It seems obvious to me that a company that sets up the software required to accept
registrations from intermediaries (registrars) could also easily accept
registrations from end users themselves. Thus, it is the registry that is the basic
service provider.

Shared registration is a compulsory intermediation scheme. It's a way for ICANN to
extract taxes from domain name registrations and to regulate domain names. You pay
them a $2500 application fee and a $5000 annual accreditation fee, and promise to
pay them $1 a domain name, and they "bless" you as accredited.

The importance of the registry, and the relative insignificance of the registrar, is
evident with a little bit of thought. If register.com was blown up by a stray
missile tomorrow, it wouldn't affect me or the vast majority of Internet users a
bit. If NSI's or Nominet's zone files were destroyed, all hell would break loose.
The idea that running and maintaining a database that can have no significant
downtime and must be capable of accepting millions of transactions a day doesn't
sound trivial to me. Customer service isn't trivial, either, but all registrars do
to service customers is get information and action from a registry. They are
intermediaries. If customers want intermediaries, fine. If they don't.....?

I certainly agree that the cost of registration is cheaper than the price, and that
margins for NSI and Nominet are probably pretty high. Sounds like a good reason for
directly competing registries, to me.

Incidentally, one unobserved side effect of the compulsory intermediary model is
that the software for the interface is a monopoly, also. Every registrar must use
NSI's proprietary software, which it claims to have spent $25 million on. <guffaw>
There are other companies that might develop much better software interfaces. In a
competing registry environment, those companies have a market. In the compulsory
intermediary model pioneered by NTIA/ICANN/NSI, they don't.

Incidentally, isn't the annual cost for a domain name registration in dot UK, a
shared registry, MORE than NSI's evil, monopolistic $35 per year? I look forward to
your spin on that one, Kent.

Kent Crispin wrote:

> It is the registry component that is insignificant, not the registrar
> component.  Just running the registry database (which is what a
> registry does, by definition) is a trivial operation, once it is set
> up.  In a well-run registry, such as Nominet, the actual cost per
> registration is miniscule -- on the order of maybe $3/year.  With
> NSI's economies of scale, and a suitable mechanized registrar
> interface to the datase, the cost per registration should be very low
> -- probably less than a dollar per year.  Most of the cost in the
> total picture is customer support, not running the database.

--
m i l t o n   m u e l l e r // m u e l l e r @ s y r . e d u
syracuse university          http://istweb.syr.edu/~mueller/