Re: [ga] GNSO Council: Taking 21 monthsto arrive at bad decisions

[Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Elisabeth Porteneuve wrote:
> The registry-registrar scheme, and subsequently ICANN, were put in place 
> against a monopoly, which we did not like. The registrant-registrar 
> contract, with some general policy rules established in ICANN forum is a 
> guarantee for users to have a freedom of choice. In the scheme of 
> vertical integration, giving domain names away for free to an existing
> client - the very possible Google scenario - you have in place all 
> elements allowing for unwanted concentration of powers.
A few comments:

Those of us who were forced into .com during the days before there was a 
Network Solutions (nee Verisign) or even an ICANN, had no choice then, 
and, really speaking, we have no real choice now; we are locked in, with 
the alternative being to give up our domain names into which we have 
built recognition for, in my case, 20+ years.
Why did ICANN adopt, without any discussion at all, a requirement that 
domain names be rented for periods of 1 to 10 years?  Why not longer? 
(And why not shorter?)
In my .ewe TLD names are not rented, they are sold for an open-ended 
period.  Customers are protected because they pay for a name exactly 
once and can pre-buy services at today's prices even if they don't use 
those until decades in the future.  Yet that is the kind of business 
model that ICANN shuns and rejects.
The best protection would be for me as a user of .com and .org, and 
other domain name customers, to be able, at the time they are making 
their initial choice of which TLD to enter, to obtain permanent 
contracts with permanent terms that can not be changed except by 
*mutual* consent.
That kind of thing could have developed, except for legacy customers in 
legacy TLDs (e.g. .com/.org/.net) had ICANN at the outset not imposed so 
many arbitrary obligations on business models and so limited the number 
of new TLDs.
                --karl--