The ICANN board should reject the proposed revised agreements
altogether. It should realize that the existing agreements
- bad enough for
the Internet community and outrageously
lopsided in favour of NSI/Verisign -
cannot be improved. ICANN's lawyer's must realize that in any deal with Verisign
they
will lose (or more precisely, we, the people whom they are
supposed to represent,
lose out). If they are good lawyers,
they should have the humility and professional
pride to admit
that they simply are not armed for such a battle.
Verisign has
all the data. ICANN barely has access to whatever
information Verisign cares to
release. Verisign combines
an overhelming amount of macchiavellian expertise
along
with the best available market knowledge of three activities -
domain
registry, domain registrar and certificate authority.
It is most disturbing to
read ICANN's justification for the
proposed revised agreement. It looks as if
they had been written
by Verisign. ICANN staff does not seem to analyse what is
behind
the market share figures presented to them by Verisign. They
do not
seem to wonder why NSIregistrar's net new registrations
figures vary so wildly.
Before accepting Verisign's figures,
ICANN should have Verisign's and NSIregistrar's
log files
audited, and it should extract the data of its own choice
rather
than accepting to be spoon-fed by Verisign.