[IP] more on A battle for the soul of the Internet
Begin forwarded message:
From: Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 6, 2005 2:09:22 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] A battle for the soul of the Internet
Reply-To: Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
I have several comments on the item below, but I will make only one:
A battle for the soul of the Internet
By Elliot Noss, Special to ZDNet
... The checks
and balances are systemic. This is what has allowed the price of
domain names to drop by 50- to 75 percent over the last five
years...
This is one of the great fairy tales about ICANN.
ICANN likes to claim that domain name prices have dropped.
And to some extent they have since they days when the NSF let Network
Solutions collect a $50 per name per year charge.
There is no doubt that that NSF established price was artificial.
But today's domain name prices are just as artificial: They are
propped up by ICANN.
Domain name prices have not dropped nearly as far as they could have
dropped had there not been an ICANN and the artifical price floor
that ICANN maintains.
ICANN, for example, has established a price floor of several dollars
(e.g. $6 in .com) per name per year under many of the major top level
domains.
That price floor is not based on any actual registry costs. And
ICANN's contracts contain no provisions to link that floor to actual
registry costs or to incentivize registries to drive down their
costs. Had ICANN done so, and had ICANN not made the arbitrary
choice to limit name registrations to a maximum of 10 years, there is
much reason to believe that what today is a $5 or $6 cost component
per name per year could drop to levels far below $1 per name per year.
ICANN's price floor is a cost component that, despite short term
"sales" by registrars, is ultimately passed through to domain name
buyers.
In other words, as a direct result of ICANN's policies, consumers are
paying on the order of $4 to $5 per name per year more than they
ought to be paying.
Over the years the cumulative cost to consumers from this artificial,
ICANN imposed, price floor, has amounted to perhaps as much as a
billion dollars.
ICANN is costing the internet dearly - in terms of constraints on
innovation, in terms of ICANN-made supra-national legislation (UDRP)
that strongly favors certain industrial interests (intellectual
property) over others, in terms of loss of personal privacy
(publication of "whois"), and in terms of artificial prices.
ICANN is rapidly becoming everything wrong about the telco's and
telco regulatory bodies of the 1950's: an expensive and anti-
innovative bureaucracy surrounded by a system of arbitrary
regulations, hidden fees, and artifical prices.
As has been said by Harold Feld: ICANN recipulates the FCC, but badly.
I will refrain from saying anything about how ICANN has slammed the
door in the face of the community of internet users and created a
sham system that makes the system of soviets in the old USSR seem a
model of participatory democracy by comparision.
--karl--
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