Re: [ga] ICANN Board unanimously approves .biz/.info/.org registry agreements by 13-0
Roberto Gaetano wrote: You might disagree, but one of the guiding factors for the Board is uniformity of treatment for all participants.
There are TLD operators who obtained their position by inheriting a captive customer base from the days before ICANN. These are the .com, .org, .net, .edu TLDs. Many of the folks in those TLDs never had a choice, their choice of TLD was dictated by the appropriate use policies that were the norm some time back. And then there are TLDs that came along under ICANN; every person in them entered those names completely voluntarily. There is a difference - those of us who are captives in .com and .org require protection from predatory practices. We never had a choice. Those who are entering the new TLDs have a choice (albeit because of ICANN's policies a choice that often provides very little that is really different). So, there is reason for different treatment. Moreover, only Verisign among the TLD registries operates with a very old, but still alive agreement with NTIA. That, too, is a significant reason for treating Verisign apples differently than the other TLD oranges. For the future, ICANN really needs to relax its straitjacket on what TLDs can do and how they structure their offerings - only then will there be real "competition". But along the way, ICANN should remember that there are a lot of us who are locked-in, and have been locked-in, since years before there was a Network Solutions, before there was a Verisign, and before there was an ICANN. I think also that the provisions in the ICANN-Verisign agreement were forced upon ICANN (or rather, ICANN acquiesced to them without a fight) during litigation. What virtue is there in replicating those ill-provisions, such as registry fees that are based on no accounting whatsoever of the cost of performing registry transactions, to other TLDs? Is it the position of ICANN that a mistake once done is worth repeating? Might it better if ICANN were to aspire to learn and improve with each experience rather than descending to the lowest common denominator? --karl--
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