Re: don heath's comments

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Hank Nussbacher allegedly said:
> 
> On Fri, 22 Nov 1996, Vince Wolodkin wrote:
> 
> > Alan Sullivan wrote:
> > Could you explain what you mean, please.  If all TLD's are shared, and
> > every registry has the same right to sell domains in every TLD, how can
> > oneparty hoard names?  I think  the greed problem is more readily
> > apparent in monopoly registries.  How are shared registries inviting
> > greed???  I just don't get it.
> 
> I share with you .xyz iTLD.  It is very popular.  I have my
> partner set up a shell company in the Cayman Islands to register
> via me - 20,000 very popular names like pizza.xyz and beer.xyz.  I
> either charge him nothing or $50 per domain or whatever - it
> makes little difference.  When a customer comes along that wants
> pizza.xyz - it is taken and that registry points the customer to
> his shell company that will sell the pizza.xyz domain for $1000.
> You - who played fair - have nothing to offer.  DN hoarding in
> a shared iTLD is very possible unless somehow controlled via contract.

And of course it would be possible to control this via the licensing 
contract and the conflict resolution clauses -- any registry that 
suspected another registry of engaging in unfair tactics would 
present the evidence to a review board that the contract that all 
registries sign defines as binding for such cases.  The review board 
makes a decision, and takes appropriate measures.

However, that technique would be messy, and perhaps better ways could 
be thought of -- if the shared TLD had several hundred registries, 
then perhaps the registries themselves should run the review board.

The obvious way to handle this problem is to write the contract so 
that registries can fight it out among themselves in court, but that 
has the problem that all such legal approaches have -- it imposes a 
particular national legal system on the problem.  I would prefer for
conflicts to be ajudicated by a set of rules that are consistent 
throughout the internet.  That's a goal that would be difficult to 
achieve, but effectively requiring binding arbitration by a panel of 
people selected from the internet community is a start.

The requirement to use binding arbitration would be enforced by the 
laws of some country, and in practice that would be US law.  However, 
the resulting arbitration rules would be internet-wide, and the goal 
would be to invoke the US legal system only as an extreme last 
resort. 

I know that this approach would require careful legal work to set 
up.  However, that work seems to me to be substantially less than 
trying to establish uniform international law.

Also, it is worth noting that similar problems are present in the
monopoly TLD case as well -- there will have to be careful legal work
there as well.  For example, someone mentioned the problem of getting
around the "3 TLDs max per registry" rule by setting up shadow
corporations, perhaps in foreign countries.  How do we write a
contract that prevents that? 

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov		the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B6 04 CC 30 9E DE CD FE  6A 04 90 BB 26 77 4A 5E