brunner@nic-naa.net (Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine) wrote:

FWIW, we did a "Major Protest" at the Rome meeting about Sitefinder and it took Vint months to come to the conclusion that it (interposition on the lookup error semantics) was not just a business decision.

IMHO the entire issue comes down to something like this (please don't nail me on details, it's a coarsely drawn picture): - ICANN issued a formal request for proposals - Some registries-to-be - including Verisign - made offers - ICANN chose Verisign (no speculation about the reasons here) - ICANN and Verising closed a contract that had not really much to do with the original ICANN specs and RfP It's of course at ICANN's leisure to make contracts which stand contradictionary to their original intentions (all very well documented). But considered that pricing (and equal registrar access) was an important issue during the proposal evaluations, it makes me wonder where the free-pricing thing came from anyway. Apart from that, Verisign is throwing a bait here. Everybody will (money's always interesting) take the "alright, we'll discuss about the pricing issue" and forget about the "being allowed additional services without prior ICANN consultation" issue. And probably more that's in the contract. All in all, ICANN is losing reputation pretty quickly, and I would not be surprised if the ITU used this to their advantage to get a foothold in the Internet business. I am interested in what ICANN has to lose if it stuck to its original role of some neutral registry-registry. Opposed to what you, Eric, say, I strongly believe that the ICANN folks know exactly what they are doing, and why they are doing it. I also strongly believe that I wouldn't like their reasons. Elmar.

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I don't know if it is the repeated "ICANN can't be trusted / is corrupt" messaging, or the sensitivity of the .NET "rebid" (aka VGRS deregulation) that got the prompt action --

It's more that ICANN has figured out that registrars are where all their revenue comes from, and if they dragged their feet signing contracts or paying, ICANN has precious little leverage over them.

<regisitrar_hat="on"> <regisitrar_constituency_hat="on"> <regisitrar_constituency_chair_candidate_hat="former"> That wasn't our reading of the balance of forces (contractualand share) as recent as the last budget go-around. YMLV. </registrar_*> Vint's sent a note to the Registrar Constituency Chair in reply to the note from the 30 RC members present at the Luxembourg meeting. Eric