ICANN staff and VGRS settlement negotiation

["Marcus Faure, CORE Council of Registrars" <marcus.faure@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

in a recent teleconf with ICANN staff members Kurt Pritz and John
Jeffrey registrars tried to find out how the negotiations with VGRS
were performed. The only information we received was that ICANN had
some "external experts" with confidential identity who assisted in
this process.
However, ICANN staff was not able to estimate what VGRS's own cost for
a domain year is. ICANN staff did not even want to estimate if the
costs are above or below 3 USD/year.

This is an astonishing lack of knowledge for employees who work at the heart
of the domain business. I am happy to provide some guidelines that can
help getting an answer:

- VGRS runs the much smaller .net registry at 3 USD/domainyear
- DE-Nic offers a comparable service at ~ 3 USD/domainyear. Again, the
  registry is much smaller
- Having worked on the .net bid of CORE++ I estimate the costs of a
  .com to be below 2 USD/domainyear

I am sorry to state that ICANN staff obviously was not duely prepared
for the VGRS negotiations. Had it been prepared, a price increase, as
VGRS demands it, would be out of question.

Yours,
Marcus Faure
CORE Council of Registrars