Re: [gnso-vi-feb10] Competition authorities

[Richard Tindal <richardtindal@xxxxxx>]

Lol

I'm not taking a position on whether there are harms or not.   In my view it's 
situational.

What I am saying, though,  is that if we do make a rule limiting 
cross-ownership of registrars then to be consistent and logical this same rule 
should apply to resellers.   If the rule just applies to registrars it's easily 
skirted.

RT


On Apr 26, 2010, at 5:06 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:

> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> Under the CORE, Afilias and PIR proposals,  a large domain reseller,
>> let's say Yahoo,  could become the registry for .WEB and still offer
>> .WEB names to consumers.   Yahoo would simply become  a reseller for
>> WEB,  buying names from an unaffiliated registrar at a fraction above
>> the registry price.   This would give Yahoo the effective market
>> presence of a registrar, even though they were only a reseller.
> 
> Horrors! I mean, horrors???? Why exactly does this matter?  
> 
>> For example,  if the registry price was $6.00 Yahoo could probably buy
>> names from an unaffiliated  registrar for $6.05.    Even though Yahoo
>> the reseller paid $6.05 per name,  $6.00 of this flowed back to Yahoo
>> the registry,  and so Yahoo would have the presence of a registrar for
>> an incremental cost of only $0.05 per name.
> 
> ...and? 
> 
>> The JN2 position is that Yahoo could create the same potential harms as
>> a .WEB reseller they could create as a .WEB registrar,  hence JN2 seek
> 
> What ARE these harms?
>