[ga] Elliot Noss and Inspirational Comments at the ICANN Public Forum

["Richard Henderson" <richardhenderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Elliot Noss of Tucows: "The greatest accomplishment of ICANN has been creating the competitive environment for a rich ecosystem of 100's of companies. serving millions of end users. it has led to a wave of innovation.  and at significantly lower costs to end-users. This .com agreement threatens all this. the average internet users will end up paying for the increased costs. It is they who will pay money to ICANN staff and the existing monopoly. In the original spirit of competition upon which ICANN was founded, we need to liberalise and add significant extra TLDs. extra TLDs will release the pressure and drive domain prices down. Instead, ICANN's settlement threatens its greatest accomplishment. We should use competition via more TLDs to strengthen the accomplishment. What we see in this Agreement is "a failure of imagination".



I have to agree: I believe that of all the possible ways of moving the .com registry forward, the way proposed must rank as deeply unimaginative, and deeply alienated from the competitive principles which ICANN was created to promote.



Where is the competition? Where are the rival bidders that might drive prices down? Where is there any future prospect that Verisign will *not* raise prices, when they have a fiduciary onligation to their shareholders to maximise their own profits? What motivation is there for Verisign to enhance its customer service, when the Agreement provides them with secure and built-in profits virtually in perpetuity?



"A failure of imagination." I think Elliot is absolutely correct.



Yrs,



Richard Henderson