Chip,I truly tried to respect your point of view until
you said "Mr. Auerbach sound like the whiney second grader who wants only to be at
the head of the lunch line." Mr. Auerbach was publicly elected by us and is a respected
member of the Internet community.
It pains me to respond to a person, much less
someone touting to be an "investor" that spells Internet as "ineternet" and capitalization
as "capitzlation"
Your comments and my responses:
* "As I read the political
banter on this site"
I see no "banter" on this web site. I see angry people who
have paid "$35/year for a protectable piece of ineternet real estate" as you called
it, who are extremely angry over having that "protectible piece of ineternet real
estate" in danger of being unjustly taken away from them.
* "I fear that the cries
of a manic few will deter swift and necessary action on the part of ICANN"
"manic
few"? At first I thought you were referring to yourself. The overwhelming majority
of people on these bboards have been pleading for ICANN reform for years now.
*
"admittedly a large holding in our fund complex"
Thus the SOLE reason for your
posting and the reasoning behind your biased position ... money in YOUR pocket.
*
" Our "best case" scenario was a delay in implementing the prior agreement such that
most of the Registrar competition would go bankrupt, forcing ICANN to crawl back
to Verisign with a sweetheart deal. "
Verisign has a virtual monopoly in the encryption
market. Do you also want them allow NSI to regain a monopoly in the domain name market
again (it is already a cartel). Without encryption keys and domain names doing business
on the web is impossible. You want to give Verisign MORE power?
* "Registrar competition
would go bankrupt, forcing ICANN to crawl back to Verisign with a sweetheart deal."
To
the best of my knowledge I have yet to see or hear of a single registrar going bankrupt.
On the contrary Network Solutions has lost the majority of its customers mainly due
to bad customer service.
* "Under the current market conditions, one would have
to bet that most competing registrars are in serious trouble"
There is not one
shred of evidence to support this.
* "In this investor's opinion, it is a reasonable
and pragmatic compromise."
Ye$, I can $ee why your own "invistor's opinion" $eem$
rea$onable and pragmatic to you.
"$35/year for a protectable piece of ineternet
real estate is a great deal for the buyer."
You apparently don't seem to realize
that the majority of the world is so poor and under developed that 50% of the world's
population has never made a phone call. $35 bucks per year is not much to most of
the posters on the bboard but have you heard of the digital divide? Reasoning such
as this is EXACTLY why the digital divide exists.
Apparently Chip, there is no
such thing as a "protectable piece of the [Internet]" as .ORG is in danger of being
taken away from millions of people who have owned .ORG domain names for years.
For
your information, you never own a domain name, therefor it cannot be protected …
we are all "leasing" domain names INDEFINITELY via a yearly fee. It's a dream business
model for any company. You keep your customers happy and you have a product that
never runs out, never needs to be re-stocked, doesn't take up space (except a few
characters in a database), and doesn't need to be shipped. What could be easier?
To boot it's runs on software that is freely available (BIND) to the Internet community.
Not every single person needs to make a buck with every stroke of the keyboard.
*
"Register.com, sports an anemic market capitzlation of $240 million."
$240 million
is anemic? Do you realize that what register.com does can be accomplished by a handful
of talented developers? It's not easy to do but it really isn't rocket science either
… really.
"$35/year for a protectable piece of ineternet real estate is a great
deal for the buyer" … "Most serious buyers of domain names would gladly pay $100/year
or more."
Again … have you heard of the digital divide? Furthermore the digital
divide translated into 3rd world reality is a digital light year.
* "Personally,
I believe ICANN is so conerned with how the public might view" …
Anyone who has
followed ICANN for any length of time knows that ICANN could care less about the
publics view of them"
* "If it ain't broke, why are we so terribly concerned about
fixing it?"
You are definitely in the minority with that statement. There are plenty
of things currently "broke" Please ready previous forum threads.
* "So we have
the proprosed deal. Not best for either party. Not best for internet users. But acceptable.
"
What kind of logic is this? … An acceptable deal being one that is not best for
either party?
It certainly seems like a great deal for "Louis Touton" who left
a partnership position at Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue to become ICANN's Vice-President,
Secretary, and General Counsel.
Thus Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue represents ICANN
and it has, and continues to receive, a lion's share of every dollar that flows into
ICANN. They certainly DO benefit.
Board members of the DNSO, a supporting organization
to ICANN have certainly benefited. After all, some board members of the DNSO were
also on the board of organizations that submitted applications to ICANN for new top
level domains. Any they were awarded TLDs. Those people benefited.
So you see Chip.
ALL OF THE WRONG PEOPLE AND ENTITIES BENEFIT.
* "The internet world already has
enough uncertainty to deal with."
The only uncertainty is from an investor's point
of view. The people dealing with core Internet technology have no doubts about the
role that the Internet will play in the course of human history from this point forward.
Only the gold rushers are uncertain.
* "You folks at ICANN are in charge. Please
act like it."
I can only hope Mr. Auerbach and the other publicly elected officials
do just that"
So you see Chip, you are severely misinformed.
I've been living,
breathing, and eating Internet technology for about a decade now. In those 10 years
I never invested in or worked for a .COM company. Why? Because I, like many others
who understand Internet technology, saw "investors" such as yourself throwing other
peoples money at stupid Internet ideas with no sustainable business model and sporting
technology that could be implemented by a competent developer in about a week.
Everybody
ignored the signs. They invested with the hopes of making money on paper and not
on sustainable business models that generated REAL cash. In some cases the business
models that made REAL cash were overlooked because it couldn’t go IPO fast enough
to make money on paper.
It was the world's biggest poker game. The investment community
has nobody to blame but itself. So don't come crying to us about " Karl Auerbach
sounding like a like the whiney second grader who wants only to be at the head of
the lunch line", because you have only projected your own view of yourself.
Chris
Grady
Chris@grady.ORG