Re: [bc-gnso] Promoting the market efficiencies of vertical integration
I used to have a professor at Stanford who used the phrase "utter rubbish" when he came across something he didn't agree with. It's sad that the source of this utter rubbish is a Stanford professor. It totally misses the point of why silos are bad and layers are good in our generation of telecommunications. Since 1983, we in the US have been making a transition from a completely vertically integrated telecom monopoly to a horizontally layered Internet communications system that is immensely more diversified, efficient, technologically advanced and competitive than anything that existed in the years of the Bell System. Just ask yourself about the five best innovations in telecommunications in the last five years - take your pick - would any of them been successful if they didn't have one or more layers of the Internet stack to use as a platform for launching their chunk of innovation? Internet entrepreneurs today will look for and exploit market niches, and once established, do their best to differentiate their products both vertically and horizontally in order to maximize profits. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. All too frequently, the niche closes before they breakeven! But VI is pretty incidental to other economic factors. So I don't think this particular bit of "rubbish" is much help to our own discussions on VI. - Mike Roberts Darwin Group As a communications counselor, I am always looking for analogies to help aid the understanding of complex problems. I view VI at ICANN as one such complex problem. A report from the Technology Policy Institute may be the analogy.The Institute, a think tank focused on the economics of innovation and change (and headed by U.S. Senate runner-up, Carly Fiorina), has issued a report promoting vertical integration as "inherent" in efficient markets. Here is the link to the press release (with a link to the report embedded): <http://www.techpolicyinstitute.org/news/show/23247.html>http://www.techpolicyinstitute.org/news/show/23247.htmlThere are arguable differences between the open markets addressed by the report and the noblesse oblige of ICANN with regard to domain names, but I thought the article was provocative enough to add to the mix.It may all be beside the point, of course, if Kurt Pritz was to be believed at our meeting in Washington, D.C. He said ICANN does not want to have to monitor exceptions.Cheers, Berard |