Re: [wg-c] Eureka?

[Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>]

Ross:

It seems clear to me that the NSI problem is not caused by the fact that NSI
has operated com net and org as a for-profit registry. The problem is that
NSI was for five critical years allowed to be the ONLY for-profit registry
in the market that accounts for 60 percent of the world's domain names.

We had a telephone monopoly in the US for 60+ years run as a for-profit
company. There were many undesirable features of that monopoly. The
solution was to introduce competition from other for-profit companies.
It was very clear that moving in the other direction--state-owned or non-profit

monopolies--was a cure worse than the disease.

Ross Wm. Rader wrote:

> I completely understand your point, but as I've already mentioned, the idea
> that these working groups will lay the foundation for NSI v2.0 sincerely
> bothers me. There are only one of each TLD and I'm not sure that we can
> afford to screw it up by putting private interests ahead of the publics.
> Sometimes these interests are coincidental, but all to often the
> relationship ends up being extremely one-sided.
>
> -RWR



--
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/