The assumptions in this paper are all wrong

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I must say that I am confused by this paper.

Apparently, ICANN asked whether an auction could be a useful instrument 
to adopt, to a company that makes its leaving out of designing auctions. 
In no way they could reply differently than with a long sales pitch that 
promotes their services. But you wouldn't ask a car dealer whether 
buying a car to go to work is better than using public transportation, 
would you? Or at least you would already know the answer.
In any case, their main point that auctions "put scarce resources into 
the hands of those who value them the most" is plainly wrong. Even if 
you accepted that the only dimension of "value" that you have to keep 
into account is money, this would be true only if everyone had the same 
amount of money to spend in their pockets. In the real world, that 
string can be worth a lot to you, but you don't have that amount of 
money in your bank account so you can't put it on the table. Or you can 
be a wealthy billionaire that wants that string just for vanity, and can 
afford outbidding a community effort that is striving to raise money to 
compete. Maybe that community values the string a lot more than the 
billionaire, but a $1'000'000 bid is too much for the community and nuts 
for the billionaire, because their scales and their pockets are different.
There seem to be several wrong hidden assumptions in this paper. One is 
that a bid that benefits many people is also a bid that will have many 
registrations, i.e. that will work on a business model where second 
level domains are sold and money is made from that, so plenty of 
relevance = plenty of money. But one could imagine bids where no 
registrations are sold - domains are given away for free; or the TLD is 
only used for the registry to set up a few public services to be used 
freely by millions of people - still having broad community relevance.
Another wrong assumption is that monetary value is the only quantity 
that counts. In fact, personally I think that the "value" of a TLD is 
mostly connected to other factors. For example, one is how many final 
users of the Internet will ever use services located inside that TLD; 
another one is how strongly these people will feel attached to that TLD, 
i.e. whether the TLD contributes to build any kind of "community 
identity" for an online group of people that presently does not have it; 
a third one is whether the new TLD will spawn innovative uses of the DNS 
or enable innovative services. None of these is directly connected to 
monetary value, and it is quite disturbing to me that an organization 
like ICANN, which is meant to steward scarce global public resources in 
the interest of the entire community of the Internet, still seems to 
have such a partial and narrow view of where the value of the Internet 
itself lies.

P.S. By the way, the argument that you can't have comparative 
evaluations because in that case the ICANN Board would easily be 
corrupted by applicants is plainly offensive.
Regards,
--
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
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