Re: An Open Letter to the IAHC

[ejw@globecomm.net]

generally, i am disappointed in the general direction that iahc has
gone.  the postal draft, while incomplete, was almost there, and could
have polished, refined to provide a stable environment for the expansion
of the tld space.

i predict that if the iahc continues down this path it will take many
months to design, implement and roll out.  no one has said who will
run this, "CORE", as some mystical wellwisher will lots of money and
time will magically appear to make at 1 - 2% ROI.  the exchange of funds
will be nightmare, and as the draft sites, and CORE will providing service
to a middleman, but in the end, have to screw the customer if the the 
middleman does not pay.  and so on, and so on.

basically, shared registries are a stupid idea.

that said, i want to address the below ...

At 05:47 PM 12/29/96 -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>If you don't like this, take a commodity good or service. Take, say,
>wheat. There is no brand name on wheat. Wheat is wheat. Wheat is
>traded on commodity markets. And yet, people make money buying and
>selling wheat, even though I can go to any one of literally hundreds
>of sources -- even though lots of wheat are traded on futures markets
>as being completely anonymous bags o' commodity. No one "owns" wheat,
>no one promotes it. Somehow, though, people make money -- often a lot.

the main problem with this argument is that that domain names will
be eventually free in either the shared tld or exclusize tld model. 
under shared registries, people will give them away to attract customers
for other services, and many isps will be become registrars for this
purpose.

under the exclusive model the same will happen.  prices of new second
level registrations will drop as more players roll out and undercut
their competition to try and gain market share and momentum.  and they
too will eventually give away second level registrations to attempt to
sell other services, such as website design and maintenance.

either way all second level registrations will be free.

but with the exclusive license model bigger more compentent teams of
people with the necessary capital will enter the market and actually
provide some decent competition to NSI in terms of customer service, 
online support, and automated procedures.  these mystical core people
will have many more potential registrations than NSI, and as a result
have to reimplement NSI domain managament system, billing system, and
phone support infrastrucure.  hmm. 1-2% ROI defintely gets me interested
in these headaches.  have fun programming this perry.

given the inevitablilty of free domain names anyway, the exclusive model
in the postal draft is a much more rational approach to tld expansion.

>For answers to these and other mysterious questions, take a course in
>microeconomics. A hint, though, is Yogi Berra's old comment about the
>restaurant that was so crowded that no one ever went there any more.

the iahc people often are commenting how people questioning the economics
of the iahc draft need to take some business courses.  not only is this
generally unprofessional, but interesting, in that perhaps, it is the
other way around.

--ew.