----- Original Message ----- From: "John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> To: "At-Large Worldwide" <at-large@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 5:21 PM Subject: Re: [At-Large] Second Call: Call For Volunteers for the Working Group for the Vertical Integration PDP
I see it from the completely reverse angle. IMO the current situation exists to benefit registrars and domainers, to the detriment of registry choice and general pubic good by unfairly restricting trade.
The registry/registar split was my idea in the first place. In some ways it's worked out the way I anticipated, in some ways it hasn't.
Back in the 1990s there weren't very many domains, the ones that permitted public registration were all pretty big, and the only place to register them was Network Solutions, which later split into Verisign the registry and NetSol the registrar. Prices were high, and service was not great. (In particular, the option to PGP sign and verify change messages never worked in all the years it was allegedly available.)
In the 1990s there was register.com and others as well.
The idea of the split was that there'd be a lot of registrars who mostly did something else, and sold domains along with web hosting or such. That's worked out reasonably well -- all of the big hosting companies are registrars. I didn't anticipate economies of scale such that there's be enough margin to have dedicated registrars with resellers, like Godaddy or Tucows. I also didn't anticipate the vast size of the domain speculation market, since back in 1996 nobody anticipated pay per click.
Domain speculation was huge in 1994-95. Every word in the dictionary had been filed as a domain name by 1996.
I'm not a fan of domain speculators, but I don't see how the situation would be any better if there were vertical integration. Domainers buy more domains than anyone else, so if registries sold direct, domainers would still be the main market and registries would tailor offerings to them. You can argue that the situation would be worse, since now we do have some registrars who don't target speculators.
The argument that you can switch domains if you don't like the registry is just bogus, because the cost of switching is so high, and the problem is what happens if a registry changes behavior. Switching registrars does work since your name doesn't change, and provides some limit to how badly registrars can treat their customers.
I do agree that for small domains, registrars just get in the way. My inclination would be to allow domains with under a million registrations to register direct, bigger than that they have to use registrars. I also agree that ICANN hasn't done a particularly good job of making registrars behave, but I can't think of any way to let registries pick their registrars that wouldn't quickly lead to the remaining registrars becoming the captive of the registry.
R's, John
Except for the history, I agree with John. Chris McElroy
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