On 08/12/2009 02:59 PM, Franck Martin wrote:
Karl,
And you know that domain tasting was done with complacent registrars where "no money" was exchanged...
That's the point - we are charged $7 per transaction while others got it for free, i.e. we were subsidizing those others. Had those subsidized transactions cost much then we would have heard complaints from registrars whining how AGP was costing them too much. (It is ironic that that kind of whining from Verisign's predecessor, Network Solutions, was the reason why the US National Science Foundation [NSF] allowed the initiation of domain name fees.) But the registries did not whine, thus suggesting that the actual cost of registrations was actually so far below the $7 we pay that adding a few hundred million extra registrations - each with a corresponding roll-back transaction - every year didn't really cost very much. In other words, the silence is yet more evidence that ICANN's fiat registry fee is a made of nothing more substantial than hot air. The point of this, as implied by Elisabeth P. is that there is a lot of fantasy "accounting" going on inside the explicit and implicit cash flows and subsidies under the ICANN blanket. It is long past time that ICANN, which is supposed to operate to protect the public interest, pulled aside that blanket to let us see where the money is going and how much of what we are paying is for real registry services and how much is invested in marketing-image Potemkin Village build-outs (such as Verisign's Fort Knox-like sites for its servers) and how much simply ends up going out as registry pay-outs in the form of inflated salaries/bonuses/benefits, or being accumulated as retained earnings, etc. Estimates of what the real registry costs for .com names range from $0.03 to $3 (USD) per name per year. In other words, even the highest estimate suggests that ICANN is gifting unto Verisign and other registries several hundred million of our dollars every year. Is it so hard to require that ICANN make a deep accounting of registry costs and publish the results? That kind of thing is an entirely routine practice by other regulatory bodies. (The publication part is important - members of the public who are skeptical need to be able run the numbers past their own accountants.) --karl--