[At-Large] ICANN Announcement on Domain Tasting

[Karl Auerbach]

On 08/12/2009 02:59 PM, Franck Martin wrote:
> Karl,
>
> And you know that domain tasting was done with complacent registrars
> where "no money" was exchanged...

That's the point - we are charged $7 per transaction while others got it 
for free, i.e. we were subsidizing those others.

Had those subsidized transactions cost much then we would have heard 
complaints from registrars whining how AGP was costing them too much. 
(It is ironic that that kind of whining from Verisign's predecessor, 
Network Solutions, was the reason why the US National Science Foundation 
[NSF] allowed the initiation of domain name fees.)

But the registries did not whine, thus suggesting that the actual cost 
of registrations was actually so far below the $7 we pay that adding a 
few hundred million extra registrations - each with a corresponding 
roll-back transaction - every year didn't really cost very much.  In 
other words, the silence is yet more evidence that ICANN's fiat registry 
fee is a made of nothing more substantial than hot air.

The point of this, as implied by Elisabeth P. is that there is a lot of 
fantasy "accounting" going on inside the explicit and implicit cash 
flows and subsidies under the ICANN blanket.

It is long past time that ICANN, which is supposed to operate to protect 
the public interest, pulled aside that blanket to let us see where the 
money is going and how much of what we are paying is for real registry 
services and how much is invested in marketing-image Potemkin Village 
build-outs (such as Verisign's Fort Knox-like sites for its servers) and 
how much simply ends up going out as registry pay-outs in the form of 
inflated salaries/bonuses/benefits, or being accumulated as retained 
earnings, etc.

Estimates of what the real registry costs for .com names range from 
$0.03 to $3 (USD) per name per year.  In other words, even the highest 
estimate suggests that ICANN is gifting unto Verisign and other 
registries several hundred million of our dollars every year.

Is it so hard to require that ICANN make a deep accounting of registry 
costs and publish the results?  That kind of thing is an entirely 
routine practice by other regulatory bodies.  (The publication part is 
important - members of the public who are skeptical need to be able run 
the numbers past their own accountants.)

		--karl--