There are a few people who have some passing interest in ICANN so I will inflict upon the list my few paragraph summary of things that matter, see also my July 2nd post: I went so you don't have to -- ICANN Bruxelles pour les nuls. The initial report of the 65 person VI WG is published. Registry contracts executed in the 2001 and 2004 new gTLD rounds limited Registry ownership of Registrars at 15%, an artifact of the VGRS/NSI split up, with no limit on registrar ownership of registries, allowing the formation of NeuLevel (.biz through Melbourne IT and NeuStar), and the formation of Afilias (.info by several registries). At the Nairobi ICANN meeting the ICANN Board established the cross-ownership in either directions at 0%, and called for the GNSO to originate some alternative to strict structural separation, if it could arrive at such a policy be consensus. In DAGv4, publish just before the Brussels meeting, ICANN Staff proposed a cross-ownership cap of 2%. That sets the stage. The Initial Report is the first step towards policy concerning the possibility of allowing vertical integration in the DNS registry-registrar market. There are three basic positions on the issues, and a fourth position. The three basic positions are: (a) stay at 15%, that makes compliance easy, and no one has really gamed this restriction, (b) allow full integration conditionally, with serious compliance, and allow several exceptions (see also the fourth position) (c) no restriction on integration, no harms will result so compliance is not important, and exceptions are unnecessary (see also the fourth position). These policy positions are advocated by: (a) Afilias, PIR, GoDaddy, several NomCom appointees and others, including myself (for CORE), subject to some functional exceptions relating to registry services provisioning and market share, (b) NeuStar, Network Solutions, Verisign, Enom, and several others, (c) Several smaller (than the top 4) registrars and some people from the Business Constituency and some Free Market ideologues. In terms of balance of forces, it is pretty much a three-way tie. The fourth position is the Intellectual Property Constituency, which seeks an exception for brand owners, and no others, from whatever limits are proposed on cross-ownership. It has no support outside of the IPC, but when all the inchoate "exceptions for X" are summed, there is the appearance of strong support for what is called "single registrant" type applications. I recommend to those employed in the ISP industry the statement of the ISPCP, at pages 90 and 91. There are a lot of nuances, or tinfoil hat dress up opportunities. If Verisign, Afilias, NeuStar, CORE and Midcounties Co-operative Domains run almost all of the gTLDs, and are ineligible to provide registry services to the new gTLD applicants, what existing operators will be favored? What capitalization will start-up operators have to secure to meet the SLA, DNSSEC, continuity instrument and other costs in excess of the application fee and subsequent fees the new applicants must capitalize? Are the Free Trade Guys and ICANN's economists right, the market will correct any abuses and competition authorities will be there when the market doesn't correct an abuse? Is "continuity" or "change" the better policy w.r.t. the registry function and the registrar function? I trust this will be at least as useful as the jrandom luser plaint concerning what singular Animal, Mineral or Vegetable controls the singular capital-I Internet and the IANA function sniping. Oblig disclosure. The VI WG has been more than a quarter of my paid time since it began. I'm in the "continuity" camp and my Statement of Interests is linked to from the Initial Report. An outcome I'd like to see avoided is registrars preferentially selling their own-or-partner inventories, resulting in a by-registrar-affiliation partition of the non-state DNS as a market not dependent upon state actors, resulting in reduced competition with the legacy gTLD registry operators and their properties. Yeah. I know. Nothing other than redelegation of .org has created competition for Verisign. Eric