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Auerbach Weighs in for gTLD Lotteries
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Our proposed TLD addition procedure [syr.edu] solves this problem completely, I wonder whether people have read it when they make comments like this.
First, it requires only commercial applicants to win TLDs through auctions, setting aside 10 per year for noncommercial or LDC applicants. Segregating those two categories raises some issues, but not insoluble ones. Second, it doesn't require ANY auction or lottery at all when there are fewer applicants than the fixed annual number of slots.
Hey, folks, can we agree to adopt a basic convention that applies to all discourse on this topic? Let's agree that the statements of the form:
Auctions for X (you name the resource) means that only "the wealthy" will get X"
are impermissibly stupid. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but such statements are really lacking touch with reality. Market economies can be characterized as a series of "auctions" for any available resource at any given moment. If you want someone to paint your house, you pay the prevailing market price for it. If you want food, you pay a market price for it. Market allocation doesn't mean that "only the wealthy" eat or are housed; on the contrary, the more efficient allocation that results often means that the resource is more widely available than it would be otherwise.
The price of obtaining a TLD in an ICANN auction is likely to be significantly less than the price of acquiring the computer hardware and the expert personnel required to operate the registry. Does Karl want to allocate computer experts' labor by means of lottery tickets?
Why is the TLD allocation supposed to be suddenly exempt from the market economy? Let's get real about this.
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[ Reply to This | Parent
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This is a non problem, indeed.
There is no need for auctions, lotteries, or any other artifical method of perpetuating scarcity.
Allow any and all qualified applicants to operate a registry.
There is, quite clearly, no reason to limit the number of entities allowed to compete in this market.
If you have a problem with the rate of addition, assign the order randomly if you must.
Honestly, why do you academics insist on making a problem significantly more difficult than it really is? Are you just looking for something to do with your time?
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[ Reply to This | Parent
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"First, it requires only commercial applicants to win TLDs through auctions, setting aside 10 per year for noncommercial or LDC applicants..."
"Auctions for X (you name the resource) means that only "the wealthy" will get X"
One statement does not cancel out the other. If all commercial applicants, whether small or large, are subject to a lottery, Karl's statement is valid. Only the wealthy will get slots. Small enterprises would not have a prayer and those who exist now would be once again left out after years of operating in good faith.
"If you want someone to paint your house, you pay the prevailing market price for it. If you want food, you pay a market price for it. Market allocation doesn't mean that "only the wealthy" eat or are housed..."
If you refer to the chain supersmarkets and leave out the mom and pop corner market or farmers market, open air market, that's one thing. At least in the marketplace, there is room for the little market, which has a chance to grow into the supermarket. With an ICANN lottery, only the supermarket chains would have a chance. There would be no room for the entrepreneur and we continue with the status quo.
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[ Reply to This | Parent
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I don't see how, in a market with many fewer items for sale than people who want those items - such as the TLD marketplace - that an auction ends up with any result other than the scarce resources ending up in the hands of those who have the most money to pay.
Having lived in California and endured the manipulative creation of artificial and minipulated scarcity of electricial power - which cost me and the other residents of my state many billions of dollars - I'm less than fond of using auction systems to allocate scarce resources, particularly when the supply of those resources (electricity or TLDs) can be (and has been) manipulated.
As I said in my note, not everything in life is reducible to dollars. Having multiple pools of resources, some up for auction, some up lottery, etc, may be a viable solution. However, those approaches do require that someone, somewhere act as a god-figure and partition the resources into allocation pools.
The big issue is scacity - artificially created scarcity - that creates a situation in which the availability of new TLDs will so far outstrip demand that "normal" economic tensions will never have a chance to come into play.
I've suggested 10,000 new TLD slots a year - that way in a hundred years we end up with a million TLDs. I do not see that as technically unreasonable. And I perceive that number as having a qualititative better chance of inducing the Nirvana of a real marketplace in TLDs than the less than 1.4 per year rate that ICANN has adopted.
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