I see there are two different issues here, one is that of AGP and the other is of justification of registration fee/cost. Though they are indirectly inter-related, I see reducing the domain name tasting is a good step forward and ALAC and Atlarge community should get credit for that. When we started to bring this issue, by asking staff report to initiate GNSO policy development process, many registry and registrars were not so supportive. Some said we should not constrain the creative business or innovation, and others said nothing is illegal. Of course, that does not mean we should stop there and ignore the cost and pricing issue of monopolisctic registry. Let's move on if so needed. izumi 2009/8/13 John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com>:
Either the .com registry has now saved over 1.3 billion $US that we were previously paying and which it is now retaining as profit.
Or the registry fee is pegged by ICANN at a hyper inflated level.
I don't believe that Verisign has ever offered a cost justification for their registry fees. Considering that .COM and .NET use the exact same infrastructure, it'd take some pretty creative cost accounting to justify $6.86 for .COM and $4.98 for .NET.
At the time the board approved the settlement that gave Verisign eternal renewals and price increases, board members told me they wanted stability, and showed no interest in whether the price was related to costs.
Considering that roughly the same board seems to have no problem with the CFO speculating in the stock market with the corporation's reserve funds, with a well documented loss of over $4M, it doesn't seem realistic to expect them to exert meaningful financial oversight over anything. That's why they were doing you a favor when they didn't let you see those tedious and confusing financial statements.
R's, John
See http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/vrsncom.html
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-- >> Izumi Aizu << Institute for InfoSocionomics, Tama University, Tokyo Institute for HyperNetwork Society, Oita, Japan * * * * * << Writing the Future of the History >> www.anr.org