Colleagues, I've drafted a comment in response to http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-11apr11-en.htm The comment raises two issues, first, that renewal of legacy monopoly contracts does not achieve a competition policy goal, and second, that the contract could, whether awarded to the legacy monopoly operator or any other party, distinguish between the "registry operator" and "registry technical backend services operator" sets of functions, allowing registrants to select, through their registrars, one of one or more competing registry technical backend services operator(s) for domains in the .NET zone. For those not familiar with the second issue, the original Shared Registry Proposal by Crispin, Gaetano, Langlois and others, developed in the IETF, reduces the registry operator's monopoly power to the few functions of producing (and modernly signing) a unified zone, and coordination among two or more registrars (transfer functions and data pointers where the registry data model is "thin"). If there is anyone who wishes to go on record questioning the wisdom of auto-renewal for Verisign's franchises, and/or ending monopoly in the registry function, drop me a line today as comments close tomorrow. Eric