[gnso-vi-feb10] Weekend before starting reflections

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Things I don't know ...

1. what becomes of the registry services / registrar services boundary?

Already in the HSTLD exercise Staff dismisses the distinction. This
used to be blood sport between the RrC and the RyC, have material
conditions changed?

2. How many of the fewer than 100 registrars that actually are
registrars and not shells or paper not yet dead see value in the new
gTLD inventory?

I asked this question at Paris. No hand was raised. It means some code
reworking on EPP clients and business logic.

3. How many of the same set of registrars see value in the existing
gTLD inventory's DNSSEC value add?

These three seem to me to be questions Staff and the Board have not
been troubled by, yet we may not be simply revisiting the circa 2000
landscape and material conditions may have changed.

Note well: this week there is a BoF session at IETF-77 in Anaheim on
possible areas of work on EPP. In part this is driven by {cc+g}TLDs
with DNSSEC deployment experience, and in part this is driven by a
similar set of registry operators seeking to publish their extensions.
I'm not going to chair the eventual PROVREGbis WG but I do think there
are areas where EPP could be improved, from a registrar's perspective,
as well as the individual registry operators points of view of their
own inventory.

So there's one area of "unknowns and assumptions".

It seems to me that the lawyers in this WG have agendas of discovery
too. (1) is the "zero" or "pure" statement of position consistent with
the original competition policy, or has something else become the
"competition policy"? (2) is the change from 15% a unilateral
amendment of existing contracts?

Then there's the policy fundamentals. Is there some goal more
important than the success of the new gTLD program, a goal which is
rationally pursued by the elimination of all registrars, and possibly
all members of a much larger class of interested and competent future
registry operators?

And, as I mentioned in my first mail, each of us with an advocacy
position (and CORE's is "No Change please, the 15% cap is well-known
and well-understood and allows 7 registries to form a registrar,
should they need to") should work on our presentations till each of us
gets it down to Council presentation size and complexity (1 page or
less), and all of the rhetorical excesses and errors of fact and
fantasy have been removed by constructive review among the competing
advocacy authoring groups.

I enjoyed Mickey's chairing of the FF WG, so that's a recommendation
by someone who's worked with him as chair for a half year.

Eric