RE: [ga] ICANN Board unanimously approves .biz/.info/.org registry agreements by 13-0
Dear Roberto, this is certainly an interesting mail. At 00:40 13/12/2006, Roberto Gaetano wrote: To my reading, it was obvious that consumers would be against any raise in price, even if only potential. Having joined this circus when the cost was $35, my instinctive reaction was to calculate how many years of consecutive raise it will take to get back to the 1998 prices. I don't want to underestimate the importance of price, but I thought that one point was missing, that was IMHO even more important than the rise of the price cap: the levelling of the field, to allow all competitors to play by the same, or at least extensively similar, rules. This would, still IMHO, bring benefits to the consumers. My concern is not the registrar/registry business. My concern is the impact on the whole network stability. The higher the price, the greater the incitation for alternative solutions. IMHO for years we have lived on a false security: that alternate roots did not succeed. Alternate roots could not succeed for a simple reason: the root server system is a nuisance, except to protect USG intelligence collection and registries status-quo (what is usually named DNS stability). The situation is to change because of the Multilingual Internet has to eventually happen. ICANN has no solution for that except the inadequate IETF Internationalization ones, so it waste time. But at the end of the day it will have to make RFC 4690 conclusions' clear to everyone: "Multilingual" is something IETF does not want to hear about because it does not understand it. Then what? There are already the Chinese Names, there will be other solutions all over the places. Not alternative roots, but alternative architecture, cheaper, faster, more efficient, by stable national communities, supported by their Government. Alt-root were fought as supposed business competition, with the support of ISPs. National, Language, Local ULDs (User Level Domain, what ever the form and technical support they may use) will technically develop, show their technical stability and advantages to the users. If in addition they turn being cheaper .... ICANN carried its job. It wrote ICP-3 and called the IETF for experimentation and solutions to replace the single authoritative root architecture. In the meanwhile it reasonably protected its authority in the root environment. But IETF failed ICANN. It will not able to do much when a "no root" environment develops. The problem is the same with addressing. The IETF currently discusses the sex of the addresses discovering the obvious, because they recently understood that the routing could not scale under IPv6. We saw the NAT phenomena. What if an "IPv8" solution develops managing routing via IPv4 and NATs and location through NAT extensions. My Intlnet organisation (which does not exist, [a Danny 'fact"]) catalysed the experimentation that ICANN called for, during two years. So, I have a pretty good vision of what a grassroots SOS solution could be. And how it can happen or be triggered. You say that things were settled for the other gTLDs when .com was signed. True. This is why I am afraid that generalising to the other TLDs is settling the transition from the Internet to an InterNAT where ICANN/IANA/IETF will have a decreasing influence, yet the job to make the whole structure to continue working. And that is a problem we should discuss and prepare. Far from the ICANN business plan. Getting real. Because I do not see where ICANN will get its money from, in a very few years. All the best. jfc
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