On 21/05/2025 11:13, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
Remember the convulsions ICANN went through over "vertical integration", the idea that an organization could be both registry and registrar? ICANN's registrars fought so incredibly hard against the concept that a registry could cut them out and sell direct to the public. Whether they had value to add to the transaction was irrelevant, registrars insisted on being part of the chain whether they were needed or not. The only other industry where resellers similarly have forced themselves into the transaction whether they are needed or not, as far as I can tell, is auto dealerships.
The registrars were competing with the registries, Evan, The registry had an unfair market position and could cut the legs from under the registrars at any time. The registrars do most of the heavy lifting on marketing the TLDs and creating awareness. Without them, the TLDs would be much smaller.
One of the issues that has come up again and again in the At Large/ CPWG discussions is the importance of resellers in the market. Despite ICANN paying lip service to the reseller issue, to be diplomaticabout it, ICANN really doesn't understand the whole registry-registrar-reseller model.
Please demonstrate _why_ ICANN even needs to acknowledge this model, let alone understand it.
Because it is no longer the 1990s and the market for TLDs is more complex with a lot more potential TLDs for users. One of the problems with the current model is that it, perhaps unintentiaonally, limits the development of the Internet market at a local level in developing countries. The traditional model was that web developers would grow into web hosters and then become ICANN registrars. When this model was created, the ccTLDs often were not competing with the gTLDs because they were run from the Computer Science departments of universities and had a lot of restrictive rules. The gTLDs did not have these rules and consequently the gTLDs often dominated the growth in local country level markets at the expense of the local ccTLDs. In the mid-2000s, large-scale Domain Tasting happened and it created an artificial shortage of "good" domain names in the gTLDs. This led to a move to ccTLDs and also to the 2012 round of new gTLDs. Large-scale Domain tasting ended after some legal cases and Google demonetising PPC advertising on newly registered domain names. ICANN also got around to introducing a kind of restocking fee for new registrations and this had an effect. But the growth in ccTLDs continued and the gTLD growth was gradually overtaken by ccTLDs in countries with healthy ccTLDs. By 2009, large-scale Domain Tasting in the gTLDs had ended and so too had the artificially created demand for new gTLDs. ICANN had expected 30 million registrations in the first year of the new gTLDs. It didn't happen. It downgraded its estimate to 15 million. That didn't happen either. The expenses of becoming an ICANN registrar are relatively higher for web hosters in developing countries. While ICANN's one world aspiration is nice in theory this is what happens in reality. Infrastructure doesn't get developed in developing countries because web hosters host outside that country because it is cheaper. These hosters stay small and typically never become ICANN registrars. To complete the vicious circle, money goes out of the economies of these developing countries to other more developed countries. Rather than driving the growth of the local Internet industry, these web hosters end up driving the growth of registrars and web hosters in other countries. The ccTLDs in some of these developing countries still have to catch up but once a ccTLD gains critical mass, it will overtake the gTLDs in that market. A mid-range registrar in a developed country might have over 100K domain names. A mid-range web hoster in a developing contry may only have a few hundred domain names. The ICANN registrar model is a "one size fits all" developed when the Internet was much smaller.
To me it's the registrars that are the domain resellers in a practical sense. What you call resellers are to me simply authorized sales agents of the registrars, and I personally don't see the need for ICANN to care about them. Even moreso I wonder how ALAC and CPWG think that the
What has been happening in some developed countries is that becoming an ICANN registrar is less important because the bulk of new registrations each month are in the local ccTLD. The registration of gTLDs is often outsourced to ICANN registrars that provide registration as a service. This means that the gTLDs, ICANN's revenue stream, is coming under pressure from two sides. The ccTLDs are beginning to replace the gTLDs as a cheaper option in their local markets. The gTLD growth in developed countries with strong ccTLDs has declined. The one thing that is really keeping the gTLDs increasing is the position of .COM and a lot of that is due to it being the de facto US ccTLD and the most globally recognised TLD.
existence of resellers matters to the global public interest. Sales agents of registrars are bound by ICANN registrar agreements. The agreements govern how domains may be sold, and I don't understand why it matters whether sales are made by registrar employees or contracted agents. The agents are still bound by the agreements. What more is worth wringing hands over?
Keeping money in the economy of a developing country is a good thing because it helps local businesses to grow and benefits the people there. It also encourages development of the economy and usage of local websites and services.
(Disclaimer: In the early 2000s I was a principal in a consultancy that was one of Tucows' first OpenSRS domain resellers. I'm very familiar with the model, which is how I know that it's existence is benign and has minimal need of ICANN's attention. Registrars are accountable for the actions of their agents.)
As I said, the Internet was much smaller then and many of the developing countries had very little local Internet development due to connectivity and cost of access.
ICANN loves to talk about the diversity and proliferation of TLDs as evidence of "competition", while willfully ignoring the big-picture competition between all "memorable" domains and other methods through which Internet users connect to the services they seek.
Some of the new gTLDs are being used and have found a niche. The problem is that when people see statistics on the Web, they often miss how domain names are being used due to simplistic methodologies and iffy assumptions. Back when the survey quoted by the CCT was claiming .COM levels of usage for new gTLDs filled with heavily discounted registrations that only lasted a year, I said that the survey on which they were basing their conclusions was wrong. There is a very limited understanding of how domain names are used and more importantly, why people register domain names. Measuring user intent is almost impossible without talking to the registrants and then it becomes more like a Sentiment Analysis poll than an opinion poll. Most domain names will be deleted without ever being used. Twenty years ago, the .COM had very strong first year renewals (approximately 72%) and now the rate has dropped to around 50% according to resent comments from Verisign. Some of that is down to discounting offers. With cheaper registrations, there is sometimes less of a hurry to develop a working website. Then there is the full-fee renewal fee which is often a multiple of the discounted registration fee. That's .COM and there are different business models being used on other gTLDs with varying levels of success.
Perhaps that's the case relative to each other, but I suggest that *all* TLDs are legacy -- even the ones being created in future rounds. To me this is little difference from the the fact that we're still creating new area codes even though POTS is a legacy tech too.
The old development path for Internet usage was desktop - laptop - mobile devices. The desktop was often the family computer as they were expensive and connection prices were billed per minute. The falling costs of laptops and then mobile devices changed all that with most people now relying on accessing the Web via mobile devices and the cost of accessing the Internet has fallen dramatically. The advent of the smart phone effectively made the .MOBI gTLD largely irrelevant due to the smart phone having good screen resolution.
To me that evokes a massive "so what?"
The current ICANN registrar model is similar in parts, at its most extreme, to a kind of absentee landlord system that imposes a kind of digital serfdom on those hosting businesses in developing countries that cannot afford to become ICANN accredited registrars. The ccTLDs are providing an alternative and they have the capability to replace the gTLDs as the first choice for registrants in their country. Once that happens, there is no turning back. To use an old phrase, ICANN risks unintentionally "Balkanising" the TLD market based on whether hosting businesses can afford to become ICANN accredited or not. In market terms, it breaks down the TLD market into countries where the gTLDs are the main TLDs and countries were the ccTLD is the main TLD. Countries will shift to using their local ccTLD as their first choice TLD and gTLDs will plateau and become legacy.
ALAC's role is not, to me, the probing of business models and domain supply chains. It's ensuring that the public is served by a DNS that is reliable and resistant to abuse. Indeed, I assert (and have asserted for a long time) that the rampant mission creep that has ALAC getting involved into issues irrelevant to the broad public interest have retarded its ability to fulfill its actual bylaw mandate.
It would be good if ALAC understood what was happening and why it was happening. Without that, ALAC is just a bystander that can be ignored.
Mind, you, such public education programs could be very useful. Imagine if all the resources wasted to date on Universal Acceptance were used instead to inform the public about the differences between gTLDs and ccTLDs, and how .co runs under different rules than .com ...
UA was a nice idea. Talking to the developers of browsers and e-mail server and client software, and the Public Suffix list was important. Trying to educate the public might have been financially beyond ICANN as the public hasn't much of a clue about ICANN or its functions. As for IDNs, they are a niche and many of them simply redirect to the registrant's main website. To educate the public, registrars and resellers are the first part of that as that's where people register domain names. Otherwise, it would be more money wasted on PR with minimal results. Regards...jmcc -- ********************************************************** John McCormac * e-mail: jmcc@hosterstats.com MC2 * web: http://www.hosterstats.com/ 22 Viewmount * Domain Registrations Statistics Waterford * Domnomics - the business of domain names Ireland * https://amzn.to/2OPtEIO IE * Skype: hosterstats.com ********************************************************** -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com