Re: PAB [Fwd: DNSO Important update: The "Merged" Draft]

[John C Klensin <klensin@mci.net>]

On Tue, 26 Jan 1999 18:36:05 -0800 Kent Crispin 
<kent@songbird.com> wrote:

> As we have seen... However, my thinking has been that the registry 
> has to be paid by the registrar (in advance, probably) for each 
> name registered, and the standard way to formalize such a 
> relationship is a contract.  How do you address this issue?

Even if those contracts have to exist --and, as you point out,
there are other possibilities-- I think it is very risky to make
them part of the definition of what constitutes a registrar.
That relationship should, IMO, be defined either in terms of the
registrar-ICANN relationship or, at this point, in a way that
doesn't bind the decision.

That said, one might even have the registrars pay ICANN, perhaps
by block-units of names to be registered (not unlike the ARIN
payment model) and have ICANN pay the registry, perhaps on a
basis less sensitive to the exact number of names involved.

I'm quite comfortable leaving the details of this issue to the
DNSO itself; my concern is that we don't accidentally lock in a
policy now about which several of us seem to have reservations.

    john