more on A battle for the soul of the Internet

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com>
Date: June 6, 2005 2:09:22 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: [IP] A battle for the soul of the Internet
Reply-To: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com>



I have several comments on the item below, but I will make only one:


>   A battle for the soul of the Internet
>   By Elliot Noss, Special to ZDNet


>   ... The checks
>   and balances are systemic. This is what has allowed the price of
>   domain names to drop by 50- to 75 percent over the last five  
> years...

This is one of the great fairy tales about ICANN.

ICANN likes to claim that domain name prices have dropped.

And to some extent they have since they days when the NSF let Network  
Solutions collect a $50 per name per year charge.

There is no doubt that that NSF established price was artificial.

But today's domain name prices are just as artificial: They are  
propped up by ICANN.

Domain name prices have not dropped nearly as far as they could have  
dropped had there not been an ICANN and the artifical price floor  
that ICANN maintains.

ICANN, for example, has established a price floor of several dollars  
(e.g. $6 in .com) per name per year under many of the major top level  
domains.

That price floor is not based on any actual registry costs.  And  
ICANN's contracts contain no provisions to link that floor to actual  
registry costs or to incentivize registries to drive down their  
costs.  Had ICANN done so, and had ICANN not made the arbitrary  
choice to limit name registrations to a maximum of 10 years, there is  
much reason to believe that what today is a $5 or $6 cost component  
per name per year could drop to levels far below $1 per name per year.

ICANN's price floor is a cost component that, despite short term  
"sales" by registrars, is ultimately passed through to domain name  
buyers.

In other words, as a direct result of ICANN's policies, consumers are  
paying on the order of $4 to $5 per name per year more than they  
ought to be paying.

Over the years the cumulative cost to consumers from this artificial,  
ICANN imposed, price floor, has amounted to perhaps as much as a  
billion dollars.

ICANN is costing the internet dearly - in terms of constraints on  
innovation, in terms of ICANN-made supra-national legislation (UDRP)  
that strongly favors certain industrial interests (intellectual  
property) over others, in terms of loss of personal privacy  
(publication of "whois"), and in terms of artificial prices.

ICANN is rapidly becoming everything wrong about the telco's and  
telco regulatory bodies of the 1950's: an expensive and anti- 
innovative bureaucracy surrounded by a system of arbitrary  
regulations, hidden fees, and artifical prices.

As has been said by Harold Feld: ICANN recipulates the FCC, but badly.

I will refrain from saying anything about how ICANN has slammed the  
door in the face of the community of internet users and created a  
sham system that makes the system of soviets in the old USSR seem a  
model of participatory democracy by comparision.

        --karl--




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