[ispcp] Personal comments on the proposed verisgn agreement

[Mark McFadden <mcf@xxxxxxx>]

Fellow ISPCPers:

The constituency put out a call for comments on the proposed versign agreements.
 I've seen no comments, so I decided to post my personal thoughts.  These are
simply a contribution to the discussion and a starting point.  I hope the
constituency has a vital discussion on the issue and then is able to post to
the public forum during the Vancouver meeting.

While this may seem like I wrote it from the point of view of the entire ISPCP,
I was simply trying to imagine what I would write if I were drafting the ISPCP
position.  Please, please feel free to use as much or as little of it while you
are in Vancouver.

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A potential response on the Verisign Settlement

The vast majority of people impacted by the proposed Verisign settlement are
connected to the Internet through the community of Internet Service Providers. 
Repeatedly, our constituency has stood for reliability, fairness and
predictability for all of our customers - the users of the Internet - large and
small.

Under most circumstances we would welcome a settlement that allows ICANN to
return to its core activities.  The Verisign dispute has required staff,
financial and community resources that could have been better used on other
tasks in the last two years.  Under most circumstances we would also welcome a
settlement that provides a firm foundation for ICANN's finances.  The
uncertainty regarding income from .com has made it difficult to do strategic
planning, help in the prioritization of ICANN activities, and even distinguish
between what is possible for ICANN to accomplish and what is not possible.

Regretfully, the ISP community within ICANN cannot welcome the current version
of the settlement.

While ICANN has succeeded at putting choice and competition in the names space,
we note that .com remains the dominant top-level domain.  It will likely remain
so for the foreseeable future.  With that in mind it is essential that any new
.com agreement provide fairness and equity to the entire Internet community. 
We believe that the .com agreement with Verisign does not meet this standard.

Decisions about funding models for ICANN should not be based on individual
contract negotiations with individual providers of services.  The ISP community
believes that ICANN would set a dangerous precedent if it based financial and
strategic decisions on private negotiations with individual vendors of
services.

We believe that no single entity should have perpetual rights to a resource
under ICANN's administrative control.  There must be a system of checks and
balances in place to ensure that due process and meaningful arbitration is
available to users of registry services.  Unfortunately, the .com proposal
appears to grant Verisign unlimited control of .com without any of these
safeguards.  This puts the .com registry on a completely different setting than
any of the other registries.

We also believe that the fundamental costs of management and operation for
registries is lower each year.  Unfortunately, the proposed settlement allows
Verisign to increase their prices 7% per year without any review or safeguard. 
Regardless of whether or not Verisign intends to take advantage of this, the
principle is simple wrong: prices for domain name registration should not rise
in the future - the costs should be lower over time.  Our customers don't work
with registries to register their names - that task is in the hands of
registrars.  It is unlikely that registrars will be able to absorb the costs on
increases in the ICANN fees or registry fees.  The result is that those
increases will be passed directly to the registrants.

The Q&A posted by ICANN staff on the proposed agreements suggests that the 7%
allowance is allowed to provide for a transition to market forces to determine
prices.  The ISP community notes, however, that there is no "market" when a
dominant, monopoly is allowed to control a single resource.

The ISP community feels that the monopoly registry service ought to have a
predictable fair cost that is directly related to the actual cost of providing
the administrative registry service.  Allowing for incremental 7% per annum
increases in unfair to our customers - many of whom have no choice but to stay
in .com for business, branding or technical reasons.

The ISPCP recommends the following action:

- [* I leave this to further discussion *]


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-- 
Mark McFadden
Internet and Security Programs
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
School of Continuing Education
161 W. Wisconsin Ave., Suite 6000
Milwaukee, WI 53203
v: 414-227-3243
e: mcf@xxxxxxx
w: http://www.sce.uwm.edu