I believe that the experiment with a commercial entity
acting as a registrar has shown rather conclusively that commercial entities will
abuse the power given to them to obtain profits. That's what "commercial" is
about--obtaining profits.Using something that was not created by Verisign to give
it a new source of revenue is an outrageous notion. Since traditionally just
a single root exists for DNS (let's forget about dot.GOD for a second since nobody
is using them), registering domains under it cannot be a source of revenue for a
single company.
It's like as if a state decided to hire a commercial entity to
manage driver's license system--FOR PROFIT.
There can be no competition here, since
we only have one DNS root, hence market mechanisms won't work. We'll be ripped
off, we'll be spammed, our data will be used for marketing purposes, and they won't
answer to operational complaints.
I am outraged, and I strongly urge ICANN to give
operational control of the central registrar for all TLDs to non-commercial entities
committed to keeping the system fair for everyone.
--Stanislav Shalunov, Internet2
- Internet Engineer