On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, John Palmer wrote:
In a free market namespace (which the ICANN/USG IS *NOT*), with no un-neccessary barriers to entry, competition would weed out the players that did anti-social, predatory things like VRSGN is doing.
Either a business changes its practices to be in tune with its customer base or it vanishes.
You can do this in the current framework as well. Simply don't use .com or .net. Granted, it would be a lot easier if ICANN were more helpful, but since that apparently isn't true... There are many other TLDs out there that operate under the current system that can be used instead. They may or may not be better, but personally, I don't think anyone can be worse than Verisign. The current system protects the monopoly longer - but does not grant total immunity. They are still (eventually) at the mercy of the market, they just have more room before that happens and enough people get pissed off. Hopefully, this stunt did it. Assuming the larger organizations start to issue press releases and other public announcements (ISPs, large corps), then things will change. If the ISPs and larger companies go along with it, then too bad for the rest of us.