Re: Monopoly/Ologopoly

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Alan Sullivan allegedly said:
> 
> > Counter, a situation where shared registries are bad!  Vertical markets.
> > Say a large society (oh, say a professional body, such as... the medical
> > profession) wanted to register a .MEDICAL domain and restrict it to
> > registered professionals.  Under this, they may delegate ISO based SLD's
> > to the associated medical professions governing board.  The rules for
> > registering in this domain would be quite easy to enforce in this
> > monopoly situation.  But if the domain _had_ to be shared, there would be
> > no guarantee of a registrant meeting the criteria (hundreds of registries
> > all over the world!) thus diluting the benefit of registering in the name
> > space, both to the detriment of the profession and the general public.

I don't advocate total sharing of all TLDs among all registrars
indiscriminately, and I can imagine that circumstances might exist
where a monopoly TLD would be appropriate.  But this analogy is badly
flawed.  The single .MEDICAL registrar you postulate is also going to
have a hard time enforcing the standards world wide -- are the medical
standards in Bolivia the same as those in China? In fact a shared
registry would be just as good, if not better, for this particular
example -- the Chinese registrar for the .MEDICAL domain would be
familiar with the standards in China, for example.  We could argue
about who owns what and who controls what, but the cold fact of the
matter is that the world is really too big and varied for a single
organization to exercise control from a central point -- control has
to be dispersed.  Shared registries are one way to do that. 

> > Conclusion:
> > Whilst shared registries look like they solve a problem, it is not the only
> > solution to it (if the problem exists at all).  Further, by enforcing the
> > shared solution, a whole class of registry is prevented from operation.  I
> > recommend a serious re-evaluation of the concepts of TLDs, in comparison to
> > a free market where TLD's can be shared/resold/peered/restricted as required
In a worldwide environment shared registries are the only viable
solution that allows for the infinite cultural variety the net can
support.  When I get a domain name I want to deal with someone who
with the same business practices as me.  It's only fair to extend that
to other cultures. 

>  Hi,
> I agree strongly with Stephen, I have noted a number of problems with
> the shared TLDs and the example of .MEDICAL is another great example of
> why SHARED REGISTRIES ARE A BAD IDEA! The reason IAHC needs to take up
> issues of SLDs is because with shared registries NOBODY is responsible
> for creating policy or enforcing policy with a domain. This requires a
> generic policy that can never be covered by special case gTLDs such as
> .medical. Registries exclusive to gTLDs are a GOOD THING. The current
> monopoly of NSI is BAD. 
> Ask anyone who has had to get a domain in .com - too many horror
> stories. They HATE the current system. Just put togther a plan that
> allows registries to compete with NSI. - This leads to another question
> about the IAHC proposal - what are the 7 new gTLDs? And why 7?

"I've always been fuzzy about this good-bad thing."  (Ghostbusters)

-- 
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