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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.'"
I think you are splitting hairs with your comment. DNS certainly is not the foundation of the internet, but it sure is the thing that makes it remotely useful to large numbers of users.
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
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