[ncdnhc-discuss] Who gets .ORG ?

[Jim Fleming]

http://www.icann-ncc.org/pipermail/discuss/2002-March/001673.html
James Love love at cptech.org 

"Ok.  Two groups bid to get .org.     Jamie and friends in one group.
Milton and friends in another group.  Who gets the bid and why?  Jamie"
---

It should be obvious in your example that you have not included the
members of the I* society gaming the system. Neither you nor Milton would
get the .ORG bid, unless you had all sorts of the "right people" on your
payrolls or agreed secretly to out-source it to the I* insiders once you
got the bid.

.ORG is an interesting situation, because many of the people that bought
those names did so before the ICANN artificial Registrar/Registry split,
designed to give the illusion of competition and to distract the general public
from the fact that the .COM monopoly was unchanged. The Registrars now
claim to have some global franchise on the .ORG sales, even though they
did not really develop the name space. Apparently, all fees paid in advance
are lost in the shuffle to the new Registry, with a year of free reverse
out-sourced services to make the transition. With 3,000,000 names and
a $5,000,000 transfer endowment, that works out to less than $2 per name.
Once again, a nice deal for the I* insiders, and apparently the NC and
ICANN Board had little input into the process.

It appears that people will also have little input into the proposed .ORG
transition. At this point in time, one would expect that several companies
would be discussing their proposals. If the Internet was used effectively,
those companies could use these forums to do the planning of servers and
facilities and start the deployment of a clone Proof-of-Concept Registry.
That is obviously not going to happen, instead, we can all once again watch
as the behind the scenes deals are made and then a I* society solution
just happens to be the only choice the Board has, once they extract some
$50,000 fees from naive bidders who will not believe that the game is
rigged because of the U.S. Government endorsements of the process.

Meanwhile, it would probably make too much sense to send an e-mail to
all 3,000,000 .ORG owners asking them their opinion via a simple "write-in"
ballot. That of course would not be possible because some company
offering FREE .ORG registrations might get the most votes. FREE is not
possible in the ICANN approach, because that might draw attention to
companies that support FREE TLDs.
http://www.MOX1.com
Also, FREE is not possible because it might cause people to wonder why
.COM names cost $6, when there are 10 times more .COM names than
.ORG names. One would think that the economy of scale would work to lower
the cost when more names are registered. That does not fit the ICANN model.

If no vendor fits the ICANN package, then ICANN may just have to run
.ORG with an outsource arrangement to one of the I* insiders. ICANN claims
to be running .INT, so what is one more TLD ? It appears that in order to
get the .ORG situation structured to fit the ICANN package, first the Board
will have to be replaced with 15 hand-selected people who will be instructed
how to deal with the .ORG TLD which is the last of the low-hanging fruit on
the TLD tree. Then .ORG can be added to the small list of TLDs that
ICANN advocates can claim provide competition, without noting that all of
the revenues go to the same circle of insiders.

Who will get .ORG ?...it should be obvious that the I* society will get it...
and people in the free world might as well not even bother trying to make a proposal...

--
JF