Bruce, Some objective observer, say from Mount Olympus, or a consumer watchdog entity, should attempt to "view[ed] from the perspective of the consumer" whatever is being bandied about as "competition". Back when ICANN was in the process of deciding if there should be any new TLDs, in WG-C I posted a "what if" ... what if MicroSoft bundled a unit of registrar service in their operating system product? More generally, what will happen to the domain name profit centers, registrars and registries, when MS and AOL decide to offer domain name (provisioning or publication, or both) products and services? Is NSI, even VGRS, still in business when the dust settles? I didn't think so then. I still don't. So, even if the entire new-entity / Ira Magaziner / post-monopoly policy wasn't expressed explicitly as business competition, not "the perspective of the consumer (see above about who can form that perspective), we'd all be latent dodos (extinct species of fowl) if we put imaginary consumer concerns ahead of our own. Why shouldn't 95% of all domain buys be via a bundled "registration", and be cash-back for that matter? Why shouldn't a name in spam-free, ICANN-constrained, public-trust, pro-bono managed new gTLD or re-purposed ccTLD be via a bundled "registration", and be cash-back too for that matter? The market share of domain name users who care, let alone know to check, that a name is published by more than one nameserver, not sharing the same subnet prefix, is not large. Since you gave a milk-and-bread example, here in Portland there are two daries, Oakhurst and Hood. Oakhurst markets milk having no BGH (bovine growth hormones), which caused BGH manufacturer Monsanto to sue Oakhurst. Oakhurst and Hood both sell the same product, unit size, unit price, reseller channels, etc. The competition, the effectiveness of the marketing campaign, lies somewhere else than "choice" (non-Portland based dairys, from Vermont, as well as store-label product) and price. Do you want some BGH with your corn flakes? Incidently, milk in the US isn't priced at "what the most efficient operator could possibly achieve", there are subsidies, price floors and so on. Milk is also given away by government, as are cheese products, in fact "commodity cheese" is a staple of Indian humor, and reservation diets (inspite of the fact that most of us are lactose intolerent ;-> ) So I want to share that I think a blanket rejection of Bhavian's points, the rational points of an actor who has a business interest in selling one turn-key solution to actors entering this market, is unwise. That's the point I wanted to get across -- that we are regulated by some issue(s) other than price, and an analytic framework that defined competition as "from a consequence-indifferent acquisition-engine perspective" (rather like the "can-I-buy-1,000-names-wicked-cheap-cause-I-want-to-spam-and-I- don't-care-if-each-name-resolves-longer-than-a-couple-of-days" propositions I get from time to time) tends towards fragility and adverse consequences, and is only one claimant to the throne of "objective analysis". You have my respect, but on this point we differ. Postmodernly yours, Eric