At 09:00 PM 1/2/02 -0800, William X Walsh wrote: >Wednesday, Wednesday, January 02, 2002, 6:35:13 PM, Robert L Mathews wrote: > > Yes, it sucks that Verisign has a monopoly on the .com registry, but they > > do have it > >Blame the Registrars, including OpenSRS, for this one, and not >fighting to maintain the existing contracts with Verisign, and instead >giving them the goldmine of a virtual lock forever on .com and that >they didn't have to abide by their agreement to spin off their >registrar. > >The bird is coming home to roost.
I have held this post in my inbox for a long time... not sure I want to open this can of worms, especially given all the current healthy debate that is happening around expired names etc... however, I was at the ICANN meeting when this all went down, and involved in various discussions with different parties, and I feel I need to make a couple of points: - the most cohesive (and not often talked about) point is that the original agreements were not strong enough to force the sort of change that most people desired - it would have been (relatively) easy for VRSN to comply "to the letter" of the conditions of divestiture and not had a material positive effect on the market (or negative affect to them) - in fact it likely would have had a quite general negative effect - now, this is certainly in the "opinion" zone, and it is hard to speculate what really "would have happened", however the scenarios I was privy to were not desirable by anyone - granted, it is possible that more favorable conditions would have been created had one of these scenarios played out, however, this is not my opinion - there were some generally positive concessions (albeit small) that were won in these negotiations between ICANN and VRSN At the end of the day, on the policy front it often comes down to picking battles based on: - your ability to win - what you will get if you win - your downside if you lose Given all the data we had at the time, an assessment was made and we did not dedicate a huge pool of resources to fighting this issue. This should not be seen as an endorsement on our behalf of the results, just a battlefield decision. Regards, sA
