New registry services (Jisuk,Carlos,Marc - please note)

[Marc Schneiders]

On Sat, 8 Nov 2003, at 22:17 [=GMT+0900], Chun Eung Hwi wrote:

> I think your observation is itself very valuable and interesting.
> But I want to be more practical. Regardless of whatever your thinking is,
> now, our constituency should face the new PDP regarding "new registry
> service". And it has something to do with how to regulate any kind of
> value added or value destructive or value changing services in registry as
> well as registrar. For me, it is somewhat unclear why such a different
> classification would be so important at this moment. Because I think such
> observations could be very diverse and maybe controversial depending on
> viewpoints.

I am sorry if my remarks sounded as theoretical. I was of a very
practical mind, I thought myself. How can we talk about something, if
we don't know what it is? To make it worse: I think ICANN staff does
know what it has in mind. It would be most helpful, if we knew too.

> As you asked, I am also wondering how many and what kind of such services
> could be available. Then, I think many unexpected possible services could
> be available as we looked at such examples like WLS and wildcard services.

Verisign called sitefinder a new service. It is not a new service, it
is changing the behaviour of an old servive. WLS is a new service. It
went through a process within ICANN.

> As Technical Advisory Committee pointed out, there are several best
> practices and tacit promises regardless of standards in DNS. Therefore,
> there must be many other possible additional services available although
> we cannot guess it beforehand.

If you mean that registries cannot just change things like Verisign
did with Sitefinder, I agree with that. But then we should totally
reformulate the problem. It is not about new services after all then,
is it?

> Now, focus is not Verisign and their wildcard service but how ICANN will
> act in response to some future business actions of Registry/rars.

This is then mere theory. Please, give examples. Nobody introduces a
new law, or new rules, unless it is clear what they are attempting to
accomplish, in this case to avoid, counter, fight.

> In Carthage workshop on wildcard service, I felt that wild card service is
> not an easy challenge. Now, Technical Advisory Committee's official
> position is that they are still analyzing that. And one other problem is
> that at least 18 or more ccTLDs have already been using wildcard service.
> If necessary, the accusation of wildcard service and Versign should be
> separately raised and discussed. Anyway, in my thinking, Council
> discussion is not directly challenging Verisign but dealing with ICANN's
> reguation issue.

So the real question is:

Given the division of responisibilities between registries and
registrars (an unfortunate division grown from the need to break a
monopoly), what procedures should be in place to
monitor/approve/counter changes in their service behaviour of
registries?

And for the future: Should we not give up the registry/registrar
model? If there are 30, 60, 90 general, open TLDs, each run by a
registry/registrar, the market can, finally, decide. I think the
present problem is a child of this registry/registrar model to which
ICANN so far has adhered (even for small sTLDs like .museum).

I make part of my living in a university by making researchers fill
out lots of forms about how much they publish, what trips they make,
and checking and controlling that. But I believe that it would be much
more productive to give each of these researchers the money, and see
after two or three years, whether they've come up with something that
is a success.  Yes, I should be looking for another job. I am. But
that is not the point. The point is that you cannot stiffle the
internet by bureaucratic procedures like the ones that will surely
emanate from this PDP. It is no more than creating jobs @icann.