[soac-newgtldapsup-wg] On the unstated assumption (was: Re: Q&A - RyC and JAS WG VERSION 2 - PLEASE REVIEW by Friday May 20)

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Colleagues,

In a previous note I discussed the following which appeared in the set 
of questions posed by a Stakeholder Group in a Chartering Organization.
"Assuming the fees are reasonable with regard to services provided to 
registries, would other registries be expected to make up the deficit? 
 Or does the WG believe the fees are too high?  If the latter, was 
any analysis done to support that position?"
I wrote today to Craig Schwartz, ICANN's Registry Liaison, to ask a 
question, my goal being simply to determine if there is evidence to 
support a flat-value presumption (from ICANN to the registries), or if 
this presumption is contra-factual.
I asked if, to the best of Craig's knowledge, registry "relations" 
cost (contract compliance, all sundry dickering with the registry 
operators included) is "flat" across the open and sponsored 
registries, or could he make some qualitative distinction between some 
registries and others, possibly supporting a quantitative difference?
Craig's response was that registry "relations" costs are not "flat" 
across the gTLD registries. He went on to make the non-surprising 
points that the bigger gTLD registries generally have larger and more 
complex operations and issues and as a result they generally do take 
more resources to support, and the non-surprising, but unrelated in 
the context of the initial fees, or transactional fees, which are our 
context, point that negotiations for the renewal of some agreements 
cost far more to conclude than ICANN may ever recover from the 
registry fees from those smaller sTLDs.
So, the observation I made that the operational experience over the 
past decade is sufficient to distinguish between registries following 
some policies, is supported by the available facts.
It is therefore, reasonable to decline the premise offered that 
everything is like the large gTLDs, and attempt to associate 
reasonable fees for the actual services rendered, by ICANN, to the 
qualified applicant, and upon transition to delegation, the qualified 
registry operator.
A response to "Assuming the fees are reasonable with regard to 
services provided to registries ..." could therefore be of the form 
"Large registries consume more ICANN services than small registries, 
and are not relevant to attempting to determine the equitable 
contribution of small registries, which the JAS-WG believes is the 
correct characterization of assisted registries in their initial 
years, through fees, to ICANN."
Thank you all for your patience.

Eric