Sarah, I'm copying your question and my response to the main CCWG-Accountability mailing list, as the discussion of scenarios has been limited.
Thanks for sending this. Looks okay. I am just having trouble understanding #8 (Technology competing with DNS) and why the consequence would be the same as that of #5.
Scenario #5 posits a industry specific financial crisis, and anticipates a significant reduction in domain sales generated revenues, hence registrar and registry failure, where those registrars and registries business models fail under reduced demand, hence continuity costs to the corporation which has made some "stability", hence persistence guarantee to the remaining registrants. Scenario #8 posits a technology competing with DNS, and anticipates the same consequence as Scenario #5, as you've observed. Distinct root causes are posited which have indistinguishable consequences. Turning to the root causes hypotheticals for Scenario #5 -- domain industry specific events affecting business models ... Suppose a loss of return on investment for the industry specific pay-per-click business model -- the ppc business model coupled with "domain tasting" caused the .com zone to grow by a third. "Tasting" was ended by Board action a decade ago, if I recall correctly, so a decline in PPC could reduce the largest source of recurring revenues by a third in the space of one or two renewal cycles, with failures of PPC-dependent business models (I'm not suggesting that either the .com operator, or the corporation, are PPC-dependent businesses). Similarly, suppose second level domain registration of trade marks by third-parties no longer presents a dilution liability for trade mark holders. Again, and industry specific collapse of business models predicated on either trade mark exploitation or trade mark protection is certain, with a loss of recurring revenues to the corporation. Turning to the root causes hypotheticals for Scenario #8 -- competitive technologies associating resources and identifiers ... Suppose a commodity platform vendor or consortium of vendors offer a resource and identifier association mechanism with user uptake competitive with the existing DNS mechanism and market. To the degree the non-DNS resource and identifier association mechanism obtains market share, the DNS market actors -- registries and their sales channels, the registrars, and the corporation, will loose revenue. If you are unfamiliar with non-DNS resource and identifier association mechanism, there was hosttables, which today could be distributed more timely than the every-three-days frequency we made distributions from SRI prior to the conversion to distributed lookup (DNS), meeting most use cases other than those depending on "rapid update" -- at zero cost to the registrants during that period. We should expect that researchers around the world are investigating successors to service and/or resource location applications -- some pursuing string-similar search, which has obviously matured into an industry larger than the DNS industry, and some pursuing alternate forms of loosely coupled distributed lookup. I trust that this explains why both #5 and #8 have recurring revenues reduction consequences in an otherwise unaffected general economy. Finally, a reminder that SOIs must be submitted ... Eric On 1/5/15 11:28 PM, Sarah Kiden wrote:
Hello Eric,
Thanks for sending this. Looks okay. I am just having trouble understanding #8 (Technology competing with DNS) and why the consequence would be the same as that of #5.
Please clarify.
Thanks, Sarah
On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@abenaki.wabanaki.net <mailto:ebw@abenaki.wabanaki.net>> wrote:
Colleagues,
Attached please find an initial set of scenarios, in two pages, in .pdf and .docx formats.
Feedback via email please, either to me directly (ebw@abenaki.wabanaki.net <mailto:ebw@abenaki.wabanaki.net>) or to the WS4 sublist (ccwg-accountability4@icann.org <mailto:ccwg-accountability4@icann.org>).
Thanks in advance, Eric Brunner-Williams Eugene, Oregon
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