Re: ICANN, VeriSign Will Consider Changes on .net Agreement

["Elmar K. Bins" <elmi () 4ever de>]

brunner () nic-naa net (Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine) wrote:

> FWIW, we did a "Major Protest" at the Rome meeting about Sitefinder and it
> took Vint months to come to the conclusion that it (interposition on the
> lookup error semantics) was not just a business decision.


IMHO the entire issue comes down to something like this
(please don't nail me on details, it's a coarsely drawn picture):

  - ICANN issued a formal request for proposals
  - Some registries-to-be - including Verisign - made offers
  - ICANN chose Verisign (no speculation about the reasons here)
  - ICANN and Verising closed a contract that had not really much
    to do with the original ICANN specs and RfP

It's of course at ICANN's leisure to make contracts which stand
contradictionary to their original intentions (all very well
documented). But considered that pricing (and equal registrar access)
was an important issue during the proposal evaluations, it makes me
wonder where the free-pricing thing came from anyway.

Apart from that, Verisign is throwing a bait here. Everybody will
(money's always interesting) take the "alright, we'll discuss about
the pricing issue" and forget about the "being allowed additional
services without prior ICANN consultation" issue. And probably more
that's in the contract.

All in all, ICANN is losing reputation pretty quickly, and I would
not be surprised if the ITU used this to their advantage to get a
foothold in the Internet business.

I am interested in what ICANN has to lose if it stuck to its
original role of some neutral registry-registry. Opposed to what
you, Eric, say, I strongly believe that the ICANN folks know
exactly what they are doing, and why they are doing it. I also
strongly believe that I wouldn't like their reasons.

Elmar.