Re: [gnso-vi-feb10]

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Jon,

I wanted to make sure that this cross-ownership argument is not made
with some claim of benefit to resolving the problems the 2001 sTLDs
experienced, retroactively or in the future.

That is, for whatever reason this form of cross-ownership is advocated
as good policy, no necessity pleading is offered for some benefit,
direct or indirect to {small, orphan, community-based, ...} registries.

CORE does not sell {.museum, .cat}, though it operates them, and it
sells {.com, ...}, and as far as we can tell, from the inside of both,
no harm arises from this. Operation of .cat generates a profit.
Operation of .museum generates a loss. On average, it is a wash and
we're not aware of cross subsidization, between our registry
operations line of business and our registrar line of business, and we
just did an audit so I'll look at the auditor's report before or
during the Brussels meeting.

I think the only real issue is the function of the registrar towards
the inventory of the registry which holds more than nominal ownership
or control in the registrar.

No self-sales is distinguishable from self-sales-with-condition, with
at least one suggested condition being some cap on ownership and control.

Something to avoid is repeating the shell registrar experience. We
don't need to be crafting policy to create registries that have no
business purpose except when "owning and controlling" a profitable
.com registrar.

Shell registrars are a nuisance as careless people (some on staff) use
the 900 number to justify some claim, such as having actual contracts
with registries is a contract management impossibility, and going out
of our way to create registries with no discernible business case is
likely to create similar distractions from policy problems that
involve viable, independent registries.

Eric