Had Verisign chosen to tender a competitive bid, factors other than the extremely specialized knowledge of the incumbent contractor would have been determinative.
Similarly, had the North American Numbering Plan Administrator (and also the .US operator) chosen to tender a competitive bid, again, factors other than the extremely specialized knowledge of the incumbent contractor would have been determinative.
Acually, based on correspondence with IANA people, it is my impression that putting updates into the root zone and sending it along to Verisign is the easy part. Small countries sometimes send in requests to make foolish or impossible changes, and tactful negotiations are required to get to something reasonable since they can't tell countries that they're being stupid. Also, there is a constant stream of updates from the IETF to the ports and parameter registries, and I can say from personal experience that IANA has a lot of specialized expertise there, too. The obvious thing for a competing bidder to do would be to hire current or former IANA staff, but there's definitely an expertise issue beyond what Verisign and Neustar already do. That said, I agree with your theory about what DoC was doing. They've made it quite clear for a very long time that they're not going to use access to the root to pressure other countries. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly