Facts:1. Current situation:
No competition or "first-come-first-serve" with Verisign: Verisign holds back
expired
domain names in order to sell them in the "aftermarket". The other registrars are
helpless.
2. Bad Service: It often takes more than four months to change a contact's
e-mail address with
Verisign and sometimes even longer than that.
3. High Prices:
Renewal fees are still 35$, even though there is no reason why they are 35$ and
not
7$. It is not that expensive to keep a database running.
4. Strong Monopoly: No
unrestricted domain names (always the ones with a max. of registrations)
exist
outside of Verisign. Dot info will be introduced and Verisign belongs to Afilias,
the registry
which will run .info.
5. Shutting the "back door": Verisign will
loose their influence on dot org. Therefore .org is going
to become a restricted
gtld now. Verisign will thus continue to keep its monopoly on unrestricted
gtlds.
6.
Strange Deadline: Why has this contract, which is of highest importance for the stability
of
the internet, not been shown to the public several months ago? A bottom-up
consensus must grow
and the whole discussion should have been opened to the public
long before the contracts were
"ready", even before the decisions about new gtlds
were taken.
7. Buttom-up-Problem: Now we are shown a contract which can obviously
not be modified
anymore. We may say "yes" or "no".
8. Lucrative contracts:
Both parties take advantages from these contracts: ICANN gets more
money and
Verisign can continue to keep their monopoly of unrestricted gtlds.
Therefore
both parties praise these contracts.
8. Left-out Question: Where is the advantage
of the internet community resulting from these
contracts?
Why isn't the internet
community (and even some directors of ICANNs board of directors) allowed
to take
their time and think about the contracts? - Verisign and some ICANN lawyers seem
to have
discussed them for nearly a year behind closed doors.
9. What does
"good" exactly mean?: If the contracts are that "good", why does Verisign fear a
further period of discussion and why aren't they ready to consider any changes?
10.
Conclusion: Obviously the contracts are not good.
Otherwise Versign would behave
differently. They are not ready to allow more time for reviewing
these contracts
and threaten not to sign them anymore. ICANN knows what this means: they
won't
get the money mentioned in these contracts anymore.
Therefore ICANN is eager to
hurry.
The fact that Versign does not refrain from such kind of pressure (on ICANN)
shows their real
intent: No competition please, not even from ICANN.
If ICANN
signs these contracts, they may be looked upon as an organisation bought by
Verisign.
These
contracts clearly need to be revised.
Respectfully,
Friedrich Kisters
CEO
Human
Bios GmbH
Seeblickstrasse 34-36
CH-8280 Kreuzlingen