Dear All, At the close of today's call Evan mentioned the Vertical Integration Working Group and his impression of it, which I expect are shared by several others. As I see it there is one fundamental issue: will the registrar function remain mostly indifferent to registry ownership or will the registry function partition into several disjoint patterns? The general proposal promoted by registrars wanting to acquire registry margins, and also by registries wanting to acquire registrar margins, is to have both registrar function and registry function held by the same investors. With each of {GoDaddy, eNom, TuCows, NSI, ...} and each of {VGRS, Afilias, NeuStar, CORE-RSP, ...} holding portfolios of new gTLD properties, and affiliated registrars, respectively, this will lead to a market in which each actor promotes their portfolio interests. The resulting market, independent of the value of the commercial propositions of the dominant registrars and the incumbent registry operators, will be "Balkanized". A variant of this proposal is also promoted by registrars wanting to acquire registry margins, and also by registries wanting to acquire registrar margins, is the "Not in your own TLD" modification, which is described by some (me included) as lipstick on a pig. Under NiyoT, any pair of {GoDaddy, eNom, TuCows, NSI, ...} and/or {VGRS, Afilias, NeuStar, CORE-RSP, ...} may cross sell the portfolio interests of their partner, or more generally, the corporations within their trust or combine. Again, resulting market, independent of the value of the commercial propositions of the dominant registrars and the incumbent registry operators, will be "Balkanized", into larger commercial clumps than in the original cross-ownership proposal. These are adverse outcomes for consumer choice, however, the effect does not stop at the certainty of price gouging and limited choices. The real harm is not the immediate "consumer harm", but the failure of the competitive portion of a formerly monopoly market, now an oligopoly, to transform the monopoly market to a competitive market. Thank you all for your time reading this. I don't expect to change anyone's mind, only to explain why I don't think the most important issue is some claim of merit advanced either by a registrar looking to own one or more registries, or by a registry looking to own one or more registrars, and why I think the Board made the correct choice at Nairobi and lowered the allowed cross-ownership from 15% generally in the 2001 and later registry contracts to a strict separation of 0% cross-ownership. Eric