The sale of domain name rights to Verisign will only exort Verisign to price gouge domain name owners and registrars with continuing incresing "fees"
I quote an article from the Economist http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2177567 in Oct 30 2003 I will also mail the article to you on the hope that someone reads it. 1) "In September, VeriSign launched a service that automatically redirected users who mistyped a non-existent .com or .net address to VeriSign's own search engine, where it earned advertising revenue. Alas, this disrupted other Internet technologies: it fooled certain spam filters into assuming that some junk e-mail was legitimate, for example. After ICANN threatened legal action, VeriSign agreed to suspend the service." 2)"This shows how much the market for Internet addresses has changed. VeriSign needs new services to generate revenue, since selling names and operating the registration system is not as lucrative as it once appeared. In 1998, it had a monopoly on .com and .net addresses; now, after ICANN introduced competition, its market share is roughly 25%. When VeriSign acquired the registration business in 2000 for a staggering $21 billion in shares, it justified the price tag based on the potential to bolt its web-security software on to the underbelly of the interne's address infrastructure. But such synergies failed to materialize. In October, VeriSign sold its retail name-registration business to Pivotal Private Equity for a paltry $100m." 3)"More importantly, VeriSign's willingness to risk antagonising its regulator reveals the extent to which ICANN's authority is in doubt." 4)"n the past, the debate over how to run the Internet has focused on the risk that too much government regulation might stall innovation. Indeed, industry and governments themselves actually established ICANN, rather than hand the Internet to the UN, to prevent just that outcome. But after the dispute with VeriSign, it is clear that an equal threat facing the network is unbridled commercialisation. Ultimately, the Internet needs to be regulated in order to be preserved." |