[soac-newgtldapsup-wg] Choice of platform and eligibility determination

[ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Michele,

You raise an issue. Without disclosing specific details you and I and some
others who participate in the JAS WG are aware that the terms and conditions
offered to applicants vary. There exists a registry operator, that for some
rational return on investment policy has made "all costs covered" offers to
one or more potential applicants -- some "city" hosting some future event
of the highest marketing value being that operator's goal in making an "all
costs covered" offer to relatively marginal regional linguistic and cultural
applicants what may seek an alternative to a national government affiliated
registry operator.

These offers and others exist. They are for the most part predicated on the
predicted structures of costs and revenues many years into the future.

We can't, nor can the panel we envision recommending, evaluate the degree
of economic separation between an applicant claiming it meets the support
qualifications and an enterprise holding the .com zone franchise or an
enterprise holding the North American Numbering Plan Administrator franchise
or an enterprise holding the Internet Society's operational franchise, or
simply an arbitrary, and therefore unknowable, to us, or the agency we are
recommending the existence of, equity ownership and access to credit.

For this reason if an applicant selects the apparent terms and conditions
of "[Verisign,] Neustar, Affilias or someone else", and the latent benefit
of the market power, as a registry operator, or registrar, determining the
eligibility of the applicant is problematic.

Implementing Recommendation 20 does not require us to provide support only
through incumbents, though some of the "in kinds" form of support has that
origin. Nor does implementing Recommendation 20 require us to provide support
through incumbents. Given the degree of difficulty in distinguishing between
the eligibility of "the applicant" and the eligibility of "the applicant and
the unqualified investor-operator", it is fortunate that we are able to
recomment implementing Recommendation 20 independently from unqualified
third parties.

Eric