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 Pretty Brazen
posted by michael on Tuesday October 25 2005, @08:43AM
Regarding the new ICANN-VRSN peace treaty, is it too late in the day to be shocked at the brazenness of this term in the Versign/ICANN agreement in which Verisign promises to,
reiterate its support for ICANN as the appropriate technical coordination body for the DNS, in particular with respect to Internet domain names, IP address numbers, root server system management functions, and protocol parameter and port numbers. VeriSign also agrees that it will continue to be an advocate for the private sector solution to the coordination of Internet names and addresses, including (without limitation) that VeriSign will advocate ICANN's appropriate role in that process.
What does it mean about internet governance when ICANN (whether viewed as a 'bottom up consensus driven' body, or a proxy for the US government) contractually binds a key member of one of the constituencies that are supposed to govern it so that this party has a duty to become ICANN's cheerleaders, and pays them off for this by allowing them to charge more in a what amounts to an ICANN-granted monopoly?
If nothing else, this sort of deal is in very bad taste: Is ICANN trying to make WSIS look good? Or so confident that WSIS looks bad that ICANN can do anything? Or is ICANN running scared, and (as usual) confident that no one reads the fine print?
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Pretty Brazen
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My preliminary comments [icann.org] are in the Public Comment Forum [icann.org]. I hope more people will oppose this agreement that is not in the interests of domain name registrants.
If ICANN was negotiating for the USA during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we'd all be speaking Russian today. I wouldn't trust them to negotiate over a deal involving staples and paperclips, let alone this multi-million dollar blunder. Hopefully those with a little more experience than ICANN's wannabes, from the Business, ISP, Registrar, IP and even the Non-Commercial constituencies of the GNSO will weigh in with opposition to this abysmal failure of a settlement.
Better to have gone to trial -- there's no way an arbitrator or judge would have given VeriSign what they squeezed out of ICANN (and domain registrants, ultimately). Put the .com registry up for tender. Tucows already said they could operate the .com registry for $2/domainyear. It would be interesting to see Neustar, Denic, Afilias and others provide a ballpark price to operate the registry --- prices would certainly be going down, to benefit consumers, and not up.
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...and what's that endorsement really worth anyway? I mean, isn't this the equivalent of having Cuba and Iran weigh in on the side of the EU's WSIS proposal?
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