Re: [wg-c] Unofficial report on L.A. meeting

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

> > Behalf Of John Charles Broomfield
> > Sent: Friday, November 05, 1999 2:23 PM
> 
> > > And, to put the whole thing to rest, NSI has a for-profit
> > registry, and has
> > > just been granted it for 4, perhaps 8 years. To limit new
> > registries to
> > > non-profit only would be giving NSI the only for-profit
> > registry. That
> > > is, to this non-lawyer, a huge antitrust violation.
> 
> > I don't agree that the NSI scenario is currently a
> > "for-profit" as you put
> > it.
> 
> Erhem... John,
> 
> In my universe there is only one definition of for-profit and there are no
> clauses in that definition. NSI is in business to make money over and above
> (as far over and above as possible) that required to recover cost of
> operation. They have to pay out profits to their owners and operators. Their
> annual statement proves this ... annualy. Their corporate filing explicitly
> states that they are for-profit. That you disagree is patently ludicrous.
> 
> IMHO, Chris's point is valid and germane.

What Chris wants is something completely different that what NSI has *now*,
despite him completely saying that he just wants the same as NSI all the
time.
NSI won  (a long time ago) a competitive bid to run com/net/org where at the
end of that bid, everything would be returned to NSF.
NSI has fought a quite succesful fight to manage to hang in there despite
the odds, outwitting a lot of attempts to get the thing re-bid on a
competitive basis at the end of the term.
When the NSF put out that bid, it was never imagined that it would grow so
big. In any case, the current agreement is that finally everyone (including
NSI) agrees that com/net/org will be run in a very strict and controlled
sense (though of course NSI is allowed to earn money from it, where that
money is the difference between the ICANN agreed charge per domain and their
running costs, so it is in their interest to make it as lean as possible),
and that later on it will be rebid competitively.
So, (although they've completely outlived their term, proving the fact that
once "in" there, a company will probably fight to STAY "in"), what we have
is that NSI won a COMPETITIVE bid to run com/net/org, and that it will be
run in an acceptable way to ICANN (ICANN says that it is to be at low and
fixed price per domain, and that NSI-registry cannot keep it exclusive but
must have a standard and open interface and accept any registrar acredited
by ICANN), and that ultimately the registry part will be re-bid.

Chris/IOD does not want a competitive bid to run ".web", but wants it to
(more or less) do as they wish with it.

Saying "all I want is the same conditions as NSI" is a nice attempt at
misdirection. Unfortunately (for IOD) it is not true.

Stay tuned to this channel for more lawsuits from IOD...

Given the above scenario, com/net/org is a non-profit situation, as the
rights belong to ICANN, and ICANN will not be profiting from them above
running costs. NSI-registry will be allowed to make a REASONABLE profit, but
nowhere near the money-making cow that they have been used to up to now. On
the other hand if NSI-registrar manages to make profits beyond your wildest
dreams, hooray for them because that area IS a competitive area (unlike that
of the TLDs which are all natural monopolies). True that NSI-registrar
starts off with a 6 million+ customer database which they acquired in a
non-competitive manner, but there's not much that can be done about that
apart from sueing the hell out them (hmmm, hello IOD!!).

Yours, John Broomfield.