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ICANN Releases New .com Contract
truthsearch writes "The Register is reporting that ICANN has released a revised contract for all dotcoms. The new revision hopes to bring an end to the huge legal fights surrounding the core of the Internet. From the article: 'Significant changes have been made to the deal - which will hand control of all dotcom domains to current owner VeriSign until 2012 - following widespread criticism from the Internet industry. Changes include limits on VeriSign's price-rising powers, reduced scope for VeriSign to sell personalized data to third-parties, and marginally increased control over VeriSign's ability to introduce changes to the existing dotcom business model.'"
And what about removing the restrictions on the evil corporate whois lookup verisign has imposed?
My dotcom all of a sudden has been replaced by a bunch of online poker links.
From the Full Article:
Under the new agreement, VeriSign will seize control of all expiring domains and will be entitled to sell them through its own system - keeping 10 percent of the proceeds. CFIT is, naturally, furious about its business model being blown out the water.
So how many of the complaints against ICANN and VeriSign represent actual concerns about the Internet as a whole, and how many are about domain-squatters losing their effectiveness?
Now, perhaps .com is the `core' of DNS, but even that's not really accurate. It's just the most popular top level domain ...
But then again, if you think that the WWW is the Internet, then you might think that your domain name is the core of it. (It's not, and it's not, but it might be a popular misconception.)
Ill be truthful here: I have absolutely no idea what will come of VeriSign taking over .com initative. I dont really give a flying...damn about finding out either. Chances are things will adapt soon and domain maintenance will be taken care of as usual, and the only people who will end up affected are domain name companies, and even then, those appear not to be affected that much. But, whatever it is, at whatever time it is, for whatever publically broadcast reason, it is made to benefit the corporate interest: In this case, Verisign.
Let the Flamebait, Offtopic, and Political downvoting begin!
Apparently ICANN has suffered some sort of stroke or mental lapse. Can they honestly think that the ".com" extension is simply going to fade into the sunset anytime soon, given that virtually every important company has a website with that extension and vast marketing tied to their ".com" address? I haven't noted a boom in the number of ".info" domains lately. ICANN has sold out to VeriSign and is bring this out in the hopes that it will appease most of their critics, since anyone with a brain in their head will see it's a sham.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
marginally increased control over VeriSign's ability to introduce changes to the existing dotcom business model.
The business model here being the sale of dotcom names, which wasn't immediately clear to me. So it means "VeriSign will be able to raise prices on dotcom domains, though not quite as fast as they WANT to."
This might be a wise time to buy a long-term plan on your domain, if you own one. A lot of services have a feature where you can buy X years at a low price. It's unlikely that prices would inflate fast enough to make it seriously obnoxious, but it gives a nice feeling of security to know that your domain is yours, all paid off for the next X years.
(Well, safely yours with the exception of things like that locking snafu a couple years back. But nothing you won't hear holy hell raised about.)
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
I barely give a shit one way or the other, but I do like the "reduced scope to sell personalized data" if that is meaningful and not just hot air.
I resent evil corporations making profits out of selling stuff just because they can, knowing the average Joe can do nothing about it. Corporations are psychopathic entities and should have no right to exist or natural-person rights as they do in the USA. They ought to be taken out the back and shot.
I'm not sure if it will truly be possible to alleviate legal concerns regarding ICANN and management of the domain name system. ICANN is one of those pseudo-government entities that is fairly impervious to legal mandates it seems. Sure, we hear that changes will be made, but who is reaping the benefit of these changes?
In most situations where there is true competitive (closer to a free market than a regulated one), the end user AND the service/product provider both profit from the competition. Any changes that are made are done so to favor the user -- you don't see price increases in a truly competitive market unless there is a real supply or demand curve change. You also don't see products getting shoddier for no reason. Most things that occur in a free market of competition occur because the customer demands it, and the provider much make the changes or they'll lose out to the providers who will accept the future.
ICANN doesn't have to embrace any changes based on their monopoly status. Just as we had a telephone monopoly in the US for decades (to the disadvantage of the consumer), we're seeing the same things happening with ICANN -- a lot of political wrangling, promises to do better, and guarantees that the bad days are long gone.
Guess what? Nothing will change. The biggest way to change a bad company is to scare them out of their mind that someone will come and provide the same product or service in a cheaper way, faster, or at a higher quality.
"A new direct contribution that VeriSign pays to ICANN direct"
.COM sales, so instead they appoint Verisign and Verisign levies the fee instead and nobody complains about the straight conflict of interest in that?
So ICANN failed to convince everyone it should get a hefty tax on
"However, the new agreement still provides VeriSign with a presumptive right of renewal - meaning effectively that it is given permanent control of the dotcom registry, and it also allows the company to seize control of all expiring domains - something that has become a large secondary market."
They force you to use their Netsol Whois, if you query a domain on their Whois the domain does not expire when they say it will, they hold it in limbo because you used their Whois. They offer it to you at their inflated price.
[I just submitted my initial comments on the ICANN-VeriSign revised settlement, although it takes a while for them to appear at http://forum.icann.org/lists/revised-settlement/ . See http://www.icann.org/topics/verisign-settlement.ht m for the revised settlement, and send your own comments to revised-settlement@icann.org]
.com registry would have brought the wholesale cost of .com domains to the $2/domain per year level, approximately, a 66%+ reduction in costs. Yet ICANN considers it a negotiating victory for consumers when there's no cost reduction at all, but instead an average price INCREASE per year of 4.7% (i.e. 2/3rds of 7%). In technology-based industries, price REDUCTIONS, due to economies of scale, are far more typical, yet ICANN somehow feels price increases are desirable. It makes no sense.
Hello,
No matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it's still a pig. My lips won't kiss that pig.
The revisions that were made to the proposed ICANN-VeriSign settlement were extremely minor, and the staff has, intentionally or unintentionally, misread and mischaracterized the public comments on the prior settlement proposal.
One of the most misleading lines was in the analysis of public comments, where someone (no staffer signed their name to the document, to take responsibility for it) summarized the feelings toward price increases as "Regarding registrants, there was some expression that there might be some negative effects due to the potential price increases, but, the majority across constituencies expressed that the increase in cost was negligible when compared to the value of a domain name registration." Most registrants, who are ultimately paying the bills for ICANN, registries, registrars, etc, were solidly against the price aspect of the proposed settlement. As I mentioned in my prior comments at:
http://forum.icann.org/lists/settlement-comments/m sg00000.html
competitive bidding for the
The only possible reason one could conclude that price INCREASES are the norm would be if the majority of VeriSign's costs are not technological. If the majority of VeriSign's costs consist of wining and dining ICANN staff at exotic locations around the world, I might begin to see your point....
The sale of traffic data provisions is unacceptable. Notice that the language specifically permits access to data on "non existent domain names" for "promoting the sale of domain names". In other words, if example.com is getting a lot of type-in traffic, and is unregistered, VeriSign could sell that data, thereby promoting low-cost cybersquatting (since a large percentage of those types of names are TM infringements, as various independent analysts of SiteFinder concluded. Instead of monetizing that traffic itself, VeriSign will monetize it indirectly. Furthermore, VeriSign will be able to see the traffic to individual domain names (e.g. to know whether eBay.com is getting more activity than Amazon.com, or more importantly, whether yourdomain.com is getting more DNS activity than yourcompetitor.com).
With regards to Appendix W requirements related to R&D expenditures (including universal WHOIS), there continues to be a total lack of transparency, due to ICANN's continuing refusal to disclose the annual reports of VeriSign. I did a search of the 2001 main agreement at:
http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/verisign/regi stry-agmt-com-25may01.htm
and the word "confidential" appears a total of ZERO times. The number of times the word "private" is also ZERO. Yet, somehow, we are led to believe that ICANN can't release these annual reports? Why? Yet,
This is better then the UN overseeing DNS servers how?
When VeriSign was asked why they were handed control of all dotcom domains until 2012, they replied, "Why? Because ICANN!"
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The organisation that has created the most fuss about this agreement - the Coalition for ICANN Transparency (CFIT) has said that the new agreement does not answer its three main concerns and has promised to fight it "with every option we have".
Those options are quite plentiful. It is suing ICANN in San Jose and has discovery until mid-March, it has got the EU investigating the agreement, and it has a 1,000 or so documents that it got through the Freedom of Information act that it is looking into as we speak.
CFIT also reckons that the agreement will serve as a recruiting poster for it - with people signing up to make sure deals like this don't get agreed.
You can read more on my blog post. I wrote The Register article btw.
Kieren
It's obvious the "business" of TLD's is what drives ICANN. It's a shame there is not a way to force ICANN to enact reasonable domain name protections, a functional domain dispute process, or a method to assist victims of Domain Hijacks directly (re: gamesnet.net). Following the gamesnet.net domain hijack, ICANN refused to get involved in any way. Although GTE's domain hijack got immediate attention and quick resolve. I've been advised it would take a class action lawsuit to obtain their attention. However, their status in the state of California protects them from this as well.
Because obviously an international organization to handle such things, is entirely laughable. I mean jesus, the US invented the internet! The right to sell it to the highest bidder is a gawd-given right!
Widipedia has a nice summary of the alternative DNS roots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
. . .it sure does make it a lot sexier!
Igi
Hasn't Verisign demonstrated that they are evil? Why should they get a contract renewal?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
From the article: The headline issue that VeriSign was going to be able to raise dotcom prices by seven percent every year has been reduced to the fact that it can only raise them for four of the next six years and that it needs to demonstrate evidence of the fact that the price rise comes as a result of additional expense on its network to make it more secure.... Without that issue to get angry about, much of the fire against the agreement will be quenched.
A 7% increase every year for six years comes out to roughly 150% of today's price. If it's only four out of six years, that's around 131% of today's price. I'm sure this is being posited as a 19% reduction in price over the next six years, but it is merely a reduction in a proposed and rather egregious price hike. I don't see how this quenches the fire. They still look like money grubbers.
And I have a hard time figuring out how their security costs are going to go up by 30% in the next few years... shouldn't they have a security budget that can be reviewed by ICANN?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts