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

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Tue, Aug 24, 1999 at 01:57:25PM -0400, Milton Mueller wrote:
[...]
> The simple fact is that national governments can, do, and will
> regulate registries within their jurisdiction. If NSI attempted to
> charge AOL $10 million for aol.com the most important and
> serious reaction would be in the US Congress and the FCC,
> not in ICANN.

Getting congress/fcc involved is a huge overhead, and, while it might
happen in the extreme egregious case you mentioned, it is not clear
that these agencies would be at all effective, or even interested, 
in less dramatic cases.  NSI could blackmail Songbird into paying 
$135/year instead of the current $35, and with 100,000 
songbird-sized businesses, that would add $10M/year to their 
bottom line.

Given that the actual cost of a registration is extremely low, 
registries can easily come up with creative ways of increasing 
prices that will be far below the congressional radar.

One problem is that, even discounting the lockin problem, there is a
*huge* gap between the value of a domain name to a registrant, and
the cost to the registry of maintaining the registration:  an 
individual or business gets a domain name precisely because they 
want to have a distinct net presence; that presence is substantially 
more valuable than the $5/year or so it actually costs to keep a 
name in the dns.

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Do good, and you'll be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain