Re: [wg-c] breaking up (names) is hard to do

[John Charles Broomfield <jbroom@manta.outremer.com>]

> On 23 August 1999, John Charles Broomfield <jbroom@manta.outremer.com> wrote:
> >> 
> >> I'm sorry, I didn't realize we were talking about terminating NSI at
> >> a moment's notice and moving everyone into new domains.  
> >Precisely. To paraphrase:
> >---
> >DoC/NSF/ICANN: Hey NSI, stop messing around and come into line or else.
> >
> >NSI: Or else what? You gonna cut me off? Nyaaaaahhhh!!!!
> >---
> >Blocks the game a bit, doesn't it?
> Well, yes.  However, it's not necessarily our decision to remove those
> people from NSI's purview.  They are, wittingly or otherwise, customers
> of NSI.  It should be their decision whether or not to move their
> services to another system.

Erm, you haven't followed the history or read the cooperative agreements
have you?
To resume, it's NSF asking "who can do registrations for us (NSF), because
it overwhelms us. It will be on our behalf, and will be contracted for 5
years?".
NSI put in  great bid, and won it. Now they want to say that the
registrations belong to NSI.

> If NSI behaves as many believe it will, this should be a non-issue, because
> many are expecting NSI to behave in a way that would drive customers
> away given an alternative.

You won't drive away existing customers because of the lock-in.

> I'd also like to point out that if we can come to an agreement for
> rolling out the new TLDs, the framework for doing what you describe
> will be much more solidly in place.  The sooner an agreement is 
> reached, the sooner the actual implementation can begin.

I'm very much afraid that the how/when/what/how-many roll out of new gTLDs
is very much dependent on what gets decided about how NSI may operate in the
future.

Yours, John Broomfield.