settlement proposal pro and con summary

["Marcus Faure, CORE Council of Registrars" <marcus.faure@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

this is intended to be present the effects of signing or not signing
the proposed agreement. I invite ICANN staff to use this as a basis
for the forum summary. However, I recommend to all board members to
read through all of the comments. It may take you 2-3 hours, but this
is probably the most important issue that you had to resolve.

First, board and staff should be aware that there are obviously
lobbyists on the forum (see
http://forum.icann.org/lists/revised-settlement/msg00148.html ) whose
comments should be considered with caution. This is also an advice for
ICANN staff that if it wants to count pro and contra statements, it
should prepare an additional statistic for those kind of posts.

---

ICANN staff and board have faced tremendous pressure to enter into the
new VGRS agreement. I am certain that there are also behind-the-scene
attempts to force ICANN into the agreement which can not be revealed
to the community.

But let us take a step back and look at the options and their effects:

ICANN can:

* enter into the agreement

+ ICANN would receive a better funding
+ The pending litigations with VGRS would be settled
  (registrars have tried to learn from ICANN staff if there are more
  advantages, but apperently there are not)

- the price of a .com domainyear would be way above the standard that VGRS
  set itself
- the registry would be assigned to an operator that has a history of 
  being non-compliant
- ICANN will be sued by registrar associations and maybe others
- the statement on icann.org that ICANN has saved consumers millions
  of dollars would have to be replaced by a statement that the new
  agreement costs consumers millions of dollars.
- ICANN would be in violation of its core value to foster competition
- ICANN would be in violation of its core value to promote
  well-informed decisions 
  ( http://forum.icann.org/lists/revised-settlement/msg00148.html )
- staff will be accused of being incompetent
- ICANN will lose the trust of the community and would be regarded as
  a VGRS toy 
- ICANN will be weakened and will have a weaker voice in the WSIS
  process



* reject the agreement with the option to rebid .com

+ ICANN will greatly improve its outreach in developing countries if
  the domain price would be lowered to 3 USD
+ ICANN would not be accused of giving in to the ex-monopolist
+ ICANN will foster competition
+ No need to be out of line with CORE values
+ ICANN will not lose the support of the registrar community
+ It would be possible to reduce the ex-monopolists market share to 
  less than 85%

- The Verisign litigation will continue
- ICANN funding improvement would kick in later


The litigation issues seems to cancel each other out as ICANN would
settle the VGRS litigation at the costs of entering into registrar
lawsuits.
The remaining advantage of entering into the agreement is to have a
stable budget at an earlier point in time. 
Is ICANN board willing to trade its core values for money? I really
hope the answer to that question is No.

Yours,
Marcus Faure
CORE Council of Registrars