http://www.nsol.com/policy/gTLD-Registry-Best-Practices.pdf
I have looked over the Network solutions White Paper. I hope its motivation is as
transparent to others as it is to me. Basically this is an attempt to persuade ICANN
to force all new TLDs to adopt standards and practices that increase costs and reduce
innovation so that competition with com net and org registry is minimized. They are
trying to raise the bar to entry so high that only a small number of large businesses
will be eligible.
The same game was played by the telephone companies during liberalization. Imagine how
many new telephone companies we would have had in 1984 if all of them had been
expected to offer the exact same level of service and use the same operation standards
as AT&T. Eventually, of course, MCI and Sprint and other companies grew up to the
point where they could beat AT&T at its own game. But if AT&T-style requirements had
been imposed on them as a condition of entry into the market, none of them would have
been able to enter at all.
The NSI White paper attempts to make the relationship between new registries and new
registrars *exactly like* the relationship between NSI and accredited registrars in
com net and org. But most of these conditions were imposed on NSI because of its
overwhelming dominance of the marketplace. It is not appropriate to apply the same
conditions to new entrants, who do not have the same market share.
--MM
