Re: Registries and iTLDs

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Christopher Ambler allegedly said [in response to comments from Don Heath]:
[...]

> I cannot disagree more. Not only with your reasoning, but with your
> conclusion. You are mandating a scheme that discourages entrance into the
> registry business, 

There seem to be several entities eager to run shared registries.  In
fact there is good reason to suppose that an ISP which already has
good connectivity and a service center could run a registry with very
little extra overhead. 

> and denying companies the ability to select iTLDs that
> they feel they can effectively market. Furthermore, you are mandating that
> any registry that selects an iTLD that they feel they can market MUST SHARE
> that iTLD with other registries; other registries that will, in effect, ride
> on the coattails of any registry that cares to spend money to advertise
> the iTLDs in question.

But it appears to be Don's belief that "marketing" and "advertising" 
based on the name of a TLD is inappropriate.  And strictly speaking, 
no one pays for that marketing and advertising but the customers.  
Period.  You are in effect asking for a license to sell a public 
resource for more than it costs to manage it, and using that money 
extra money gouged from the public to convince them they should buy 
it. 

> > It also says that iTLDs should not be emotionally charged and should
> > be made as universal as possible  -  recognizing that we live in a world
> > that has many languages; that they should be defined by a process
> > that is ground-up  -  that is, not dictated, but arrived at through some
> > process of gaining broad consensus.
> 
> Consensus by market, Don. Any company that can be a viable registry can
> select an iTLD to market. In ANY language. Consensus is reached by market
> acceptance. This is the basic principle of capitalism, which seems to be
> working just fine, worldwide. To mandate sharing is to take a step backwards,
> and even Russia has realized that such a state of affairs just doesn't work.

And Americans are slowly realizing that corporate welfare is a bad
idea as well.  I view granting exclusive licenses to a business to
control a TLD is essentially a massive subsidy of that business.  

In the US we have countless cases where public policy has been to
license public property to companies at rates far below the intrinsic
value -- timber rights, mining claims, oil leases, grazing rights,
water rights.  The public looses, fundamentally. 

TLDs are an international resource, not a national one, so things are
somewhat different.  But it is still bad policy to give exclusive
rights to a single private entity.  It's bad in NSI's case, it would
be bad in your case. 

IMO, actually, it's worse than bad policy -- it's fundamentally
unfair, and fundamentally immoral.  But that's just my belief. 

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov		the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E  87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F