Re: [wg-c] Re: your mail

["Milton Mueller" <mueller@syr.edu>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick H Wesson" <wessorh@ar.com>

> could you think of a reason that a generic TLD should be chartered and run
> by a monopoly. Its hard from me to understand why we would take 2 steps
> back and create more situations which have taken more than 4 years to
> resolve. The NSI monopoly of the .com .net and .org gTLDs is exactly what
> I thought we were to avoid.

No. NSI had a monopoly because there were NO other registries in the world
capable of offering a gTLD. NSI was a monopoly "registry." Many of not most
of the problems associated with it could have been avoided by authorizing
new "registries" regardless of whether they were shared or not.

NSI was also a very bad registrar in many respects, but IMHO that was
primarily because one company was stuck with handling 75% of the world's
registrations.

New gTLD registries -- such as .biz or .firm -- would introduce competition.
Differentiated registries would also introduce competition for segments of
the market. It is simply wrong to say that intergation of the registry and
registrar functions per se creates a "monopoly." and it is also false as a
matter of historical record to say that the White and Green Paper processes
ruled in favor of the shared model for anything but .com. And the shared
model was chosen for NSI ONLY because it was so dominant. It is not a
serious problem for new registries with a small market share.