[At-Large] Comment on the .NET auto-renew and contract terms

Eric Brunner-Williams ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net
Mon May 9 13:46:30 UTC 2011


Colleagues,

I've drafted a comment in response to 
http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-11apr11-en.htm

The comment raises two issues, first, that renewal of legacy monopoly 
contracts does not achieve a competition policy goal, and second, that 
the contract could, whether awarded to the legacy monopoly operator or 
any other party, distinguish between the "registry operator" and 
"registry technical backend services operator" sets of functions, 
allowing registrants to select, through their registrars, one of one 
or more competing registry technical backend services operator(s) for 
domains in the .NET zone.

For those not familiar with the second issue, the original Shared 
Registry Proposal by Crispin, Gaetano, Langlois and others, developed 
in the IETF, reduces the registry operator's monopoly power to the few 
functions of producing (and modernly signing) a unified zone, and 
coordination among two or more registrars (transfer functions and data 
pointers where the registry data model is "thin").

If there is anyone who wishes to go on record questioning the wisdom 
of auto-renewal for Verisign's franchises, and/or ending monopoly in 
the registry function, drop me a line today as comments close tomorrow.

Eric



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