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

["Roeland M.J. Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com>]

> Behalf Of John Charles Broomfield
> Sent: Saturday, November 06, 1999 12:54 PM
>
> > > 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

> 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.

I really don't see why NSI made the concessions that they did. They didn't
have to.

> 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.

Got news for you, NSI won that bid by default. Who was bidding against them?
Similarly, ICANN is winning by default ... for now. It is all fine and good
to sit back and complain, but before we can throw out the pitcher, we have
to have a replacement pitcher. Do you see ICANN stepping up to run the
root-servers.net system? As much as I piss on NSI operations, they are
vastly better than ICANN operations. In fact, even YOU can probably run a
tighter datacenter, either of us have better operations track-record than
ICANN. What won NSI the bid was NSI having its operational act together.
What won ICANN its current position was a willingness to do a job that NONE
of its erstwhile competitors (yes, even ORSC and MHSC) was willing to commit
hard resources towards. Frnakly, in either case, there was no real
competition.

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

Since that is exactly what I want with my TLDs, I can't find fault with
that. I also fail to see your point.


> 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

Not true. The CNO situation is a special case, involving a government
contract. Similarly with root-servers.net, or we'd have had new TLDs a long
time ago.

> 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

See my paper for my opinon about that competitiveness, it's not.