Re: [wg-c] Switching costs: a proposal

[dwmaher@ibm.net]

At 02:55 PM 8/30/99 -0400, Milton Mueller wrote:
>The US Federal Trade Commission produced a very interesting report on domain
>name competition.
>http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/130dftmail/scanned/FTC.htm
[clip]
>These crisp, theoretically informed and empirically tested propositions from
>professional economists ....
appeared in March 1998, in response to the Green Paper.
They may well be crisp and informed, but "empirically tested"? - certainly
not in the domain name sytem. They are still just academic theorizing in
the real world of the DNS. Any proposals for adding gTLDs must take account
of the fact that the DNS is currently controlled by:
	1. NSI, which claims the power to takes its intellectual property and
create a new separate Internet ("we’ll just take our customers — all 5.2
million of them — and go elsewhere.” )	
	2. The trademark interests who really and sincerely believe that the
domain name system is a trademark system and should be administered as
such. (Not all trademark owners are in this class.) This class
unfortunately includes many companies with sufficient economic and
political clout to make a big difference in the direction the DNS is
headed, and they definitely don't want any significant number of new TLDs.
	3. The ISPs, which are making money from the existing system. They also do
not want to rock the boat by a radical restructuring of the DNS.
	4. The ccTLD holders, some of which have a strong interest in limiting the
number of new gTLDs. 
	5. and, of course, NTIA, currently supported by other major governments of
the world, and getting lots of input from #s 1,2, 3 and 4 above.

	None of these entities is much interested in theoretical economic
analysis. They are even less interested in turning over the issue of new
gTLDs to the handful of individuals who are contributing to the various
listservs and working groups.
	It would be nice if we could follow the current suggestions to come up
with a report summarizing the strongly held and conflicting opinions
represented in this group. This might be useful to the Names Council and
eventually the Board of ICANN. 

David Maher