RE: [gnso-vi-feb10] Notice: VI Call Thursday with the Economists Salop/Wright at 20:UTC

[Milton L Mueller <mueller@xxxxxxx>]

> 
> But why only Salop and Wright? Where's the plan to invite other
> (independent) economists with differing opinions or perspectives? If

Fair enough. Bring in other economists. I'd be happy to learn from and 
cross-examine them, assuming they actually know something about the DNS 
services market. 

One word to the wise - and speaking as someone with refereed publications on 
the economics of domains names in economics books* (the main difference being 
that I am stupid enough to do this for free and the rest of them will demand 
payment) - I suspect that between CRAI and Salop and Wright you're not going to 
get a dramatically different view. There will be differences about how 
competitive the market is and what standards to use to determine market power, 
but the line on vertical integration and its efficiencies and problems is 
pretty "packed down". 

Suppliers can of course always hire economists to rationalize positions that 
protect their interests, but if we are dealing with truly independent 
economists who actually know something about the domain name market (and they 
are rare), what you hear from Salop and Wright is not that different from what 
you're going to hear from any other post-Marshallian neoclassical economist. 

* Milton Mueller, "Toward an Economics of the Domain Name System." Handbook of 
Telecommunications Economics, Volume 2, Technology Evolution and the Internet, 
Martin E. Cave, Sumit K. Majumdar and Ingo Vogelsang (eds.), Amsterdam, etc.: 
North-Holland/Elsevier. (2005)