[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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