http://www.icann.org/correspondence/cochetti-to-lynn-16jul01.htm Roger Cochetti Senior Vice President, Policy VeriSign, Inc. ------ http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/registrars/Arc01/msg00858.html http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/registrars/Arc01/msg00640.html http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/registrars/Arc01/msg00738.html http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/ga-full/Arc07/msg04469.html Dear Mr. Cochetti: I have read your letter to ICANN and noted many of the responses to it. Several things seem to pop out, with even a casual reading. 1. Much of the basis of your letter seems to center around DNS end-users and their perception of who they have entrusted their domain name to. As an ex-IBM employee, who has joined Network Solutions/Verisign only recently, it should be clear to you that most of the .COM/.NET/.ORG owners did NOT entrust their name with you, because you were not with the company when many of them first registered their names. Continuing, I doubt that many of them entrusted their names to Verisign, for a similar reason, Verisign purchased Network Solutions and the existing customer base. I know in my case, I was never asked whether I wanted my names moved to Verisign management or Roger Cochetti stewardship. I have also tried to move names away from the Verisign Registrar, without success, because of the cumbersome procedures required. I wonder how many other people have tried to do that. Those statistics did not seem to be the focal point of your letter to ICANN. 2. I doubt that many people entrusted their names with Network Solutions (or Verisign) because many people viewed the .COM zone as run by the U.S. Government. They entrusted their names to the InterNIC, which was portrayed to be a 3-way cooperative agreement between General Automation, Network Solutions, and AT&T. Anyone following the DNS evolution since 1995 will know that Network Solutions attempted to make that NSF contract a sole-source contract, from the start. Network Solutions contracted Jon Postel as a consultant, in order to win the contract. Network Solutions apparently paid Tony Rutkowski for years to appear to be a neutral industy advocate. He also is now a Verisign/Network Solutions employee. I doubt that all of the .COM registrants entrusted their names with Mr. Rutkowski or the late Mr. Postel. Many people did not know who was involved with Network Solutions. In the case of Mr. Rutkowski, he was on the review board which eventually ousted General Automation from their part of the cooperative. As for AT&T, the lights may have been on but no one was home. I doubt that anyone thought they were entrusting their domain names with AT&T. People are still surprised when they discover that AT&T was supposed to be 1/3 of the InterNIC. Network Solutions appeared to tolerate AT&T, as long as they played no role. Throughout all that, people had no choice where their .COM names were registered, and still do not. 3. People talk about the separation of Registrar and Registry as creating competition. This has not been the case. What really occurred was that Verisign/Network Solutions was able to lobby for having price regulation ($6 per name per year) be instituted in order to protect their monopoly. People still refuse to answer where the $6 fee came from or what it is spent on. It is hard to imagine what a "thin-registry" does with that kind of money from 30+ million customers. If I recall, you were one of the people attending the meetings, on behalf of IBM, and encouraging the creation of this system which only gives the illusion of competition. While all those meetings were occuring, no new TLDs were allowed to be entered into the U.S. Government's legacy root name servers. The .COM zone grew from a few million names to 10s of millions of names. Instead of new TLDs, people had to resort to DLDs (Dash-Level-Domains) in order to expand the name space. In short, people had little choice, they were herded into the .COM zone with the help of the U.S. Government and people like yourself and Mr. Rutkowski. It now appears that many of the efforts over the years to help create new TLDs were actually nothing more than distractions to PREVENT any substantial number of TLDs from being added. In retrospect, if I had it to do all over again, I would now know, never to trust anyone who claims to be here to "help" create new TLDs, when they are paid by the company that will benefit most with no additional TLDs being added. You speak of people's trust in your letter to ICANN. You make claims about people's trust, which in my opinion does not exist. 4. One of the reasons that this trust does not exist is that people are confused, they often can not tell when Verisign employees are speaking on behalf of Verisign the Registry or Verisign the Registrar. In theory, one would think that Verisign the Registry would have a different personality than Verisign the Registrar. People can now choose not to do business with Verisign the Registrar, but they can not move away from Verisign the Registry. Despite Mr. Chuck Gomes paid efforts to portray Verisign the Registry as some altruistic do-gooder organization, I think many people now see that Verisign the Registry and Verisign the Registrar are largely the same company. This became even more clear in the recent distractions created at ICANN, following the November 2000 seven-TLD selection fiasco. Rather then allow the ICANN Board to proceed to select more and more TLDs, Verisign jumped in, with the help of the ICANN outside attorneys, and took center stage, to distract the ICANN Board, the Names Council, etc. to make sure their contracts were changed to their satisfaction and rubber-stamped by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Again, the emphasis was shifted away from the selection of new TLDs. The distractions resulted in more revenue for Verisign the Registrar and of course Verisign the Registry. It was interesting to see how quickly people saw what was going on, but in the end had no ability to change it, because ICANN gave everyone the illusion that they should be entrusted with all these decisions. That trust in ICANN has clearly rapidly declined, following the TLD selection fiasco, and the willingness to allow Verisign to completely dominate the .COM community which never selected Verisign as their Registrar or Registry. 5. It is interesting that ICANN chooses to showcase communication from you, but appears to ignore other inputs from people. Each day it is becoming more and more clear to people that ICANN exists mainly as an alter-ego for Verisign/Network Solutions. Some people might consider ICANN to be Verisign's "sock puppet". In other words, whenever Verisign needs to hand off some aspect of the domain name industry that is expensive to handle, or has no profit, or is able to come back to Verisign as revenue, ICANN seems to be always ready to catch the hand-off and handle it in exactly the way Verisign desires, to maximize the return to Verisign. Network Solutions used to do the same thing with the National Science Foundation. The claim was always, NSI is not doing this, the NSF has requested this. When people looked more closely they would see that NSI had usually written the NSF a letter in advance coaching them on what their next mandates should be. The NSF became the whipping boy, and NSI walked away with the revenue and profits. One example of this is the extensive MLM Multi-Level-Marketing structure that Verisign/Network Solutions has been able to help ICANN construct. ICANN accredits (really franchises) Registrars, and Verisign/Network Solutions sells them expensive software. ICANN benefits and Verisign benefits, and of course, the $6 per name per year fees continue to go to Verisign. With all the distractions, it is clear that no one wants to talk about what they $6 pays for, whether other structures would make more sense, whether other vendors could do it for less, etc. Via this well-orchestrated waltz of Verisign and ICANN around the dance floor of the DNS industry, people can now see that they are pushed aside as the dancers pass by, and in the end, the goal is to keep dancing as long as the music plays. No one seems to notice that there are only one pair of legs on the floor. Verisign clearly has the ICANN puppet strapped to its feet with a nice annual feed of .COM taxes paying the quarter million dollar per year salaries of the ICANN staff to do little but travel first-class a few times a year to do the dance. ---- Mr. Cochetti, in my opinion, the music is about to change. After over 6 years watching these dances, I look forward to seeing some new dancers on the floor. People may not realize that .BIZ was one of the first TLDs suggested to the "IANA" (aka Jon Postel) for expansion of the TLD name space. I strongly encourage everyone who has any concern about the long-term health of the Internet to move away from the .COM/.NET/.ORG name spaces to the . BIZ name space, if for no other reason than to make a statement that they are tired of the games, they are tired of the dances, and they prefer to dance to a different beat. Verisign may even want to dump their ICANN dance partner and start to regain the trust you claim people have. While that may cost you $6 per name per year, it might increase opportunities in other directions. I have a feeling the Registrars would collectively not mind having that $6/year fee. They can collectively easily deploy a thin registry for little or not additional cost to their operations. For a Registrar with one million customers, that would be $6 million per year in additional revenue. If they use $1 million of that to contribute to a shared thin registry, I suspect that would be overkill. They could pocket the remaining $5 million as profit and also dump their ICANN dance partner. For a Registrar with 2 million registrations, that amounts to $10 million in profit. That is a heavy price, to pay to watch the Verisign/ICANN waltz. Beyond .BIZ, I do not hesitate to draw people's attention to all of the good companies who continue to labor to provide more freedom, more choice, more jobs, more opportunities as the Internet continues to expand. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf/Current/msg12574.html RFC-2001-07-01-000 IPv8 Expansion of Proof of Concept TLD Development Beyond IPv8, we have IPv16. I look forward to working with all companies now entering the dance floor to help move the Internet past the distractions and into a truely competitive industry, not dominated by non-profit puppets, but instead by for-profit companies who can stand on their own two feet, and provide "production services". When one talks about "production services", I assume they are at a minimum talking about IPv16-Compliant equipment. (i.e. Carrier-Grade, NEBS, 24", -48vDC) http://www.dot-biz.com/IPv16/ Jim Fleming Why gamble with a .BIZ Lottery? Start a real .BIZ Today ! http://www.DOT-BIZ.com http://www.BIZ.Registry 0:212 - BIZ World
