[wildcard-comments] ICANN is to blame for the mess

["Aaron McBride" <amcbride@xxxxxxx>]

The last progressive thing ICANN did was breaking the monopoly at Registrar 
level 5 years ago.
Verisign disliked ICANN for that and confronted ICANN strongly in the early 
days if you remember.
After that Verisign decided to just buy them. Buy them cheap by donating some 
change for ICANN to pay for their stupid, crazy, fancy and absolutely useless 
excurisions worldwide. 
Now the watchdog is fed well and it is sleeping. 
Here is  chronology of some of the harm to the Internet done  by ICANN.

1. Absolute farce during the selection of new gTLTs and registries. Verisign 
and other "good" donors got the dough. Everyone else got the boot. Not enough 
gTLDs for the public. More years of Monopoly to Verisign and selected buddies. 
2. Some greedy idiots calling themselves new.net or something like that decided 
to introduce alternative root system as a result of 1. More instability to the 
Internet because of ICANN restricting the number of new gTLDs. Markets do not 
tolerate empty spaces, especialy when there is demand.
3. Massive abuse of the "who is" system by marketers, many of them ICANN 
acredited Registrars and/or their Resellers. ICANN again is absolutely 
incapable of any action of enforcing their own lenghty agreements. Registrars 
which pay to ICANN annual fee, got no protection whatsoever and resorted to 
courts ending up paying hefty expenses.
4. Handful of ICANN sponsors making "fat" profits in monopoly situation with 
very limited number of gTLDs available. Cost of one domain name maintainance 
(with all expenses and reasonable profits)is $2.00 per year. Verisign and other 
ICANN sponsors make over 70% net profit on the Registry business with limited 
competition under ICANNs wing. Margins unseen in the computer and Internet 
industries.
5. The introduction of more gTLDs ( beyond the blessed 7 )is pushed out giving 
the monopolies even more time.
6. The list goes on...visit http://www.icannwatch.org for more.

Bottom line. Verisign is a predator as is every capitalist enterprise. If you 
think that Starbucks is better, think twice. The only thing which makes them 
honest is the competition. Unfortunately there is limited or no competition in 
some industries - utilities, gas, oil etc. This is where the regulators come in 
place. Internet Registries must be regulated and prevented from ripping off the 
public and piling up unjust profits. ICANN is the regulator and the watchdog. 
The problem is that the watchdog teamed up with the wolf. We can not change the 
wolf. We must change the watch dog.

Aaron McBride
amcbride@xxxxxxx 


-- 
__________________________________________________________
Sign-up for your own personalized E-mail at Mail.com
http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup

CareerBuilder.com has over 400,000 jobs. Be smarter about your job search
http://corp.mail.com/careers