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.'"

Comments

and whois?

[qwp]

And what about removing the restrictions on the evil corporate whois lookup verisign has imposed?

Hey, what just happened?

[Celestial Avenger]

My dotcom all of a sudden has been replaced by a bunch of online poker links.

The Important Question

[ZachPruckowski]

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?

The core?

[dougmc]

The new revision hopes to bring an end to the huge legal fights surrounding the core of the Internet.

Um, DNS is not the core of the Internet. It's a very important/useful/popular service, yes, but it's not the core of the Internet. (If you must say something is the `core', I'd say it's the TCP/IP protocol itself.)

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.)

Re:The core?

[Azarael]

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.

Re:The core?

[HaeMaker]

Could be worse, on December 31, 1999, ABC news was in the AOL NOC and the reporter asked the guy he was interviewing, "Is this the core of the Internet?", after pausing for a moment, wondering how much time in hell he was going to spend, responds, "Yes. This is the core of the Internet."

And if you believe that...

[Billosaur]

Without that issue to get angry about, much of the fire against the agreement will be quenched. VeriSign has clearly refused to budge on it being given lifetime control of the dotcom registry, but ICANN is willing to let this go because it believes the importance of dotcoms will diminish as it releases new top-level domains and the Internet becomes more search-engine led.

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.

Raising prices

[Council]

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.)

Lipstick on a pig doesn't make me want to kiss it

[GeorgeK]

[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]
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 .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.

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,

Keeping corruption at home

[SilentOne]

This is better then the UN overseeing DNS servers how?

ICANN't control myself

[digitaldc]

When VeriSign was asked why they were handed control of all dotcom domains until 2012, they replied, "Why? Because ICANN!"

What about domain name protections ?!?!

[GamesNET]

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.