Re: Monopoly/Ologopoly

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Dave Crocker allegedly said:
> 
> At 6:09 AM -0800 12/23/96, Leo Smith wrote:
> >Valid point...To achieve the objective outlined above, IAHC should require
> >that as a condition of the exclusive licensing agreement, each licensee
> >must agree to sublicense all other CORE members at a specified wholesale
> >rate. When the registry in Indonesia receives its license, it automatically
> 
> 	at that point, I'm quite unclear why it is not just as good to have
> all of the gTLDs be shared directly, rather than doing this cross-licensing.

This gets to the heart of what I consider to be another serious
problem with the draft -- the homogenization of gTLDs and the
centralization of their control.  All gTLDs are treated exactly alike,
and shared equally among all registries.  All control over the
creation and management of gTLDs is centralized in CORE, and all data
for all registrars and registries is centralized in a single database
run under a contract from CORE.  This homogenization almost completely
negates one of the principles of the draft, that the primary
competition is between TLDs. 

This all seems to me to stem from the fact that IAHC ignored one of 
the most powerful and elegant ideas from draft-higgs -- the idea that 
TLDs have an explicit charter, and that TLDs are managed by their 
registries in accord with that charter.  With TLD charters it would 
be perfectly possible to define, for example:

        - a .law TLD, a shared TLD with a strictly enforced charter
        requiring all SLDs to be for the legal profession, and
        offering a set of services tailored to the legal profession. 
        Of course, the strict enforcement of the charter would be an
        added benefit for customers of the registry, since there would
        be no dilution of the name space by non-law related
        organizations. 

	- in general, TLDs with particular sharing rules.

	- a .exp TLD, reserved for experimental registries.

	- a .alt TLD, a shared TLD with a fixed second level
        structure. 

	- a .amateur TLD, in the spirit of ham radio, dedicating a 
        portion of the TLD "spectrum" to amateur experimentation.

	- contrariwise, a .gold TLD with extremely stringent standards 
        of connectivity and performance, where customers needing far 
        greater than normal reliability and availability could pay 
        extra for an SLD.

A corollary to this idea is the registrars do *not* automatically act
as registrars for every TLD -- they must first agree to abide by the
constraints of the charter, and continue to meet those constraints.

The draft should be modified to include this concept, and the notion
of universal generic TLDs should be replaced with the notion of a
particular charter that *defines* generic TLDs.  The CORE organization
should then be defined within the context of that charter. 

-- 
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