Re: [wg-c] Re: Importance of the Registry

[Jonathan Weinberg <weinberg@mail.msen.com>]

At 07:56 PM 7/25/99 -0400, Milton Mueller wrote:
>One the whole a good analysis, but it lacks a punch line. Which of the three
>alternatives do you support? I interpret what you wrote as an argument for
alternative
>C below:
>
>Jonathan Weinberg wrote:
>
>> A. All registries are non-profit and shared.
>> B.  Some registries are non-profit and others for-profit, but an ICANN rule
>> requires all to be shared.
>> C. Some registries are non-profit and others for-profit, and ICANN has no
>> rule regarding sharing.
>
>In other words, you said that there are several plausible conditions, such
as    --a
>small-scale registry
>    --a limited purpose registry
>When compulsory sharing would not make sense.
>
>You also pointed out that sharing does not necessarily limit the monopoly
power of a
>dominant registry, and that there are competitive constraints on
registries without
>market power, regardless of whether they are shared or not.
>
>Therefore, sharing should not be mandated by rule.
>
>Is this your position?

	Uh, no.  I wrote (or tried to write; I'm not always clear) that sharing
has pro-consumer advantages (like providing important safeguards against
TLD operator cluelessness, by making it much more likely that somebody who
is in fact skillful at providing registrar services is in fact operating in
every TLD), and that I could think of few situations where a rule mandating
sharing would in fact be a problem.  I therefore suggested that ICANN might
enunciate a *presumption* that all TLDs must support competitive
registrars, rebuttable by a showing that there would be significant
advantages to doing it some other way.

	You wrote, in rsponse to Rod:

>Most existing proposals for new registries that I know about, both
for-profit and
>non-profit in nature, contemplate some sort of special feature or identity
that would be
>undermined by compulsory sharing. We received a reminder of this Friday
with the
>proposal regarding North American Aboriginals (.NAA) and the idea for a
privacy-enhanced
>TLD.
> [snip]

	For sharing to be a problem, it seems to me, it's not enough that the
registry be either small-scale or limited-purpose.  Rather, the case in
which I found concrete problems was one in which the TLD operator was
making *discretionary* choices about which SLDs to admit -- the problem was
that unrelated registrars might not be able to replicate those choices --
notwithstanding that consumers found that service valuable.  The proposal
for a privacy-enhanced TLD doesn't raise this or any other problem with
competitive registrars; I don't understand the NAA proposal well enough to
know what's going on there.  Are there other cases you can think of in
which competitive registrars would be concretely harmful?

Jon


Jon Weinberg
weinberg@msen.com