I'm in complete agreement.
Giving a near-perpetual .com monopoly to Verisign is the key part of this ICANN
effort.
While this might be appropriate after the current TLD bottleneck is broken,
awarding it now places VeriSign in the enviable position of using its $130,000,000
annual .com revenue to protect and promote its monopoly.
If the current experiment
adding new TLDs - .biz, .name, .info, etc. - proves successful, the ICANN will be
positioned to issue 1,000s of TLDs every year for the next decade. When the issuance
of those additional TLDs are guaranteed, granting a .com monopoly might be justified.
However,
if the current experiment fails, and additional TLDs prove to foster instability,
then additional limitations on the management of .com must be imposed.
Tom Lowenhaupt
toml@communisphere.com