Re: [wg-c] bounced message, reposted for Milton Mueller

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Wed, Nov 10, 1999 at 10:53:21PM -0500, Jonathan Weinberg wrote:
> Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 17:57:49 -0500
> From: Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>
> To: wg-c@dnso.org
> Subject: Re: [wg-c] Unofficial report on L.A. meeting
> 
> Craig:
> A nice contribution overall. I agree strongly with Werner Staub's
> elaboration upon,
> and strengthening of, the analysis of why new TLDs are needed.
> 
> I remain unshakeably convinced that the profit-non-profit issue is a red
> herring at
> this stage. Let me explain once again what the reasons are. The fallacies
> in the
> reasoning are particularly evident in Craig's comments below.
> 
> Craig Simon wrote:
> 
> > If and when new gTLDs are added, I believe it would be wiser to start
> > with non-profit/cost-recovery gTLDs rather than proprietary gTLDs.
> > The underlying presumption is that if either approach is later deemed to be
> > mistaken, it would be easier to parcel off a non-profit registry (say, by
> > auction) rather than to take the registry from a private owner. In short,
> the
> > public resource blunder would be easier to fix than the proprietary blunder.
> 
> First, let me challenge the notion that adding exclusively administered
> TLDs poses
> some kind of enormous risk to the operation of the Internet, a risk so
> threatening
> that special measures must be taken to preserve options to "take back"
> delegations.

It's actually more that the *combination* of "for-profit" and "exclusively 
administered" is the problem.  As the example of .museum 
demonstrates, I am quite willing to contemplate fairly exclusive 
arrangements, if the exclusive arrangement is with an entity that is 
non-profit, 

> We have been adding ccTLDs, and associated registries, to the root for more
> than ten
> years. The vast majority of them are administrered as proprietary
> registries; i.e., a
> single entity is both registry and registrar and the delegatee has effective
> ownership of the zone files.

But only recently have any of them been really "for-profit"...  It
is, as I said, the combintation of "for-profit" and "exclusive
control" that is the problem.  Note that a combination of
"for-profit" and "exclusive control" is very close to the definition
of a monopoly... 

> > The last four years of experience with NSI provides incontrovertible
> proof of
> > how difficult it can be to get a powerful proprietary registry to modify
> its way
> > of dealing with the Internet community. Consider the grief that has occurred
> > over questions of defining norms of conduct for interacting with registrars,
> > adhering to a community-supported DRP, maintaining whois accessibility, etc.
> 
> The problems with NSI have nothing at all to do with its for-profit
> character.

Now there's a sweeping generalization.

> They
> have everything to do with market dominance, i.e. the fact that it controls
> 75% of
> the world's domain name registrations.

And there's another...

In fact, that dominance would matter far far less if it were a
non-profit public benefit kind of company.  If registrations in .com 
were done at cost people would be far less concerned, and 
furthermore, NSI would be much less concerned about losing the 
contract. 

> If you want to erode that dominance
> you need
> to authorize additional commercial, for profit registries that can compete
> effectively with NSI.

Let's see -- you argue on the one hand that we can't *start* with
just non-profits, as Craig and many other have suggested, because the
non-profits will get so much market share in the beginning that it
will be unfair to later possible for-profit registries.  But on the
other hand you argue that only for-profit registries can possible
pull any market share away from NSI. 

Interesting.

> Whether NSI was for-profit or not didn't make a bit of difference.

Of course it did.  There is absolutely no doubt that NSI's actions 
have been heavily condition by the fact that it is a for-profit 
company.  

> Indeed,
> does
> anyone on this list besides myself has any experience with trying to
> "modify the
> behavior" or a powerful state-owned monopoly telephone company? These entities
> claimed a public service mandate but often made customers wait for 10 years
> to get a
> phone line. The only thing that made them jump was competition. NSI will
> become less
> powerful when the market for gTLDs becomes competitive. Period.

But there are several ways to achieve competition.  That is the 
point of having competitive registrars.

> Folks, the Berlin Wall fell almost exactly 10 years ago, and with it, the
> idea that
> profit-motivated enterprise is an evil force to contained or eliminated.

*Nobody* is making that claim.  Indeed, that is the whole motivation
behind having competing registrars.  The criticism of the profit
motive stems from cases when it takes priority over other social
virtues.  We don't condone selling babies because it is a high-profit
enterprise; we don't condone trafficking in human body parts; or
murder for hire.  These are extreme examples, to make the point.  

But there is also the fact that effective competition depends on
rules, rules of a much more mundane sort, having to do with exclusive
control over resources.  Society as a whole is very cautious about 
granting exclusive franchises -- copyrights and patents, for 
example, give short term monopolies, and they are carefully 
rationalized in the US constitution as providing social benefits in 
spite of their exclusive character.

> This is the
> Internet economy, and the current level of Internet development is a direct
> product
> of profit-motivated firms. It is no accident that NSI commercialized domain
> names
> more successfully than any other registry.

Actually, it is crystal clear that it was largely an accident.  NSI
did absolutely nothing to market .com/.net/.org until relatively
recently.  They just rode the wave created by the invention of the 
hypertext transfer protocol.

> > Chris Ambler asks for the same (very cushy) deal that NSI got. I say the
> > Internet community should be spared a replay of this debacle.
> 
> The only "debacle" was the delays imposed on introducing new competition by
> the Dept
> of commerce and by the creation of ICANN

Indeed.  If the MoU hadn't been derailed we would have had robust 
competition a year ago.

> > I believe the choice provided by "the more feasibly fixed fiasco"
> principle can
> > expedite progress, given the paralyzing lack of consensus we have seen on
> the
> > issue of which registry model to adopt.
> 
> No, it can't. Any approach to the transition that has ICANN dictating
> business models
> is an absurd anachronism and is not acceptable to at least half of this
> working
> group.

I don't think that is correct.

> The most feasibly fixed fiasco scenario is this:
> Create shared, non-profit registries in the testbed. Create proprietary,
> for-profit
> registreies in the testbed. Create shared, for-profit registries in the
> testbed. Let
> CONSUMERS decide which ones they choose.
> 
> Am I the only one on this list who wants to give consumers the right to
> make the
> choice for themselves?

No -- that's what registrars are for -- creative competition at the
retail level.  Running a registry database is a boring back-office
operation.  NSI makes money as a registrar, not because of its 
sophistication as a database company.

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