Re: [ga] A Question

[Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dominik Filipp wrote:

> I don't understand what the costs have to do with the domain tasting.

It has a great deal to do with it.

First of all, it's more than merely Add-Grace that is at play here. 
There are several forms of 5-day free-trial "grace" periods that ICANN 
allows, add-grace being only one of these.

Now, it turns out that I actually was on the board when these were 
approved.  But as a body out attention was never drawn by "staff" to the 
existence of these provisions (didn't we read the contracts and 
addendums?  I did, but in the hundreds of pages I missed these rather 
major policies created out of thin air by ICANN "staff".)

Now, the reason that registry costs is important is because it is an 
open question whether or not this 5-day free-trial stuff actually adds 
to the costs of regular domain name consumers.  The folks doing these 
5-day things are obligated to post some money and there are other 
factors at work that might act to cover the costs that the tasters engender.

Now, I don't believe that this is the case, and if it is true that 
registry costs are as low as they must be, then it is an open question 
why ICANN is *raising* registry fees rather than lowering them.

All in all we really can't discuss the merits of this without having a 
knowledge of how much things actually cost.

And since ICANN is building registry fees into the contracts, it is 
rather important that the registry fees granted by the contracts are 
based on some accounting of actual costs.

		--karl--