I probably shouldn't be writing this, but here goes...So, Verisign renegotiates
it's contract for a couple of reasons:
a) they cannot afford to sell the
Registrar without significant ramifications on their valuation since NSI Registrar
is not worth anything near what it was purchased for 1 year ago
b) they couldn't
work any work-around deal with anyone to someone keep a retail domains business
c)
since they didn't get a new gTLD, they come out now with a controversial re-negotiation
to further detract ICANN's efforts with new gTLDs
d) while ICANN is delaying taking
care of new gTLDs (and screwing that up in the process), Verisign is backing the
efforts of Idealab!, which will start taking registratons for 20 new gTLDs in an
alternate root using the Verisign registry system
e) Idealab! then turns around
and demands these 20 new gTLDs (many of which were applied for within the ICANN process)
be added to the ICANN root, so then Verisign gets 20 new gTLD registries instead
of 1 from the ICANN process, and in the meantime, they have secured the .com and
.net registries for another 6 and 5 years respectively, while convincing ICANN that
.org could be re-organized into a restricted gTLD that they will gladly pay $5mil
into to get rid of.
This is almost too scary to think about...