ICANN, a regulatory body that is supposed to ensure that the internet's domain name system answers queries, is instead trying to make the Internet as heavily regulated as the nuclear power industry. But instead of protecting safety or stability, ICANN seems intent of simply sucking as much cash out of the internet as possible, no matter how much that might damage innovation.
We already see how ICANN is extracting a tax and a tithe out of every part of the domain name industry, and we see how ICANN is imposing its social and economic policies onto the internet and its users.
Now there is word that ICANN is apparently looking at charging $250,000 (US) to apply for a top level domain.
That's about 10,000 times greater than my estimate of what they should be charging.
As I see it there is only one legitimate question that ICANN ought to ask: Whether the applicant is willing to commit to follow internet technical standards.
ICANN seems to be like a department of motor vehicles that doesn't ask applicants for drivers licenses whether they know how to drive, but instead asks the applicants to demonstrate that they have two Oxford educated chauffeurs for their Rolls Royce.
ICANN's directors only a few weeks ago had the hubris to saddle users of the internet with billions of dollars of added unnecessary fees to register names in .com.
And ICANN continues to avoid even the appearance of examining what service level requirements they ought to impose on root server operators. And the 300millisecond response time requirement placed on Verisign isn't even the the ghost of a shadow of the kind of real technical service requirements it ought to be considering.
Certainly at $250,000, plus yearly tithes, it becomes a real business question whether to bother to apply to ICANN or simply bring a legal action, or several legal actions in separate countries, asking whether ICANN has become not merely a combination in restraint of trade, but an illegal combination in restraint of trade.
Apparently ICANN is wandering around its Petit Trianon, utterly disconnected from reality. Perhaps it is time for users of the internet to find a tennis court.
A while back, NASDAQ, a private corporation, decided to no longer do business with a private individual, Frank Quattrone, because that individual refused to disclose certain information about his business practices.
According to today's news the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) tossed out NASDAQ's decision to bar Frank Quattrone on the grounds that NASDAQ did not honor Quattrone's claim of Fifth Amendment privilege.
Assuming the accuracy of that news report, here's my question: NASDAQ is a private corporation. The Fifth Amendment deals with a privilege not to testify against one's self in a criminal action brought by the US Federal government. The Fifth Amendment does not apply to private actors.
If the decisions of NASDAQ, a private corporation, in non-criminal decisions over its own membership are constrained by the Fifth amendment, then might ICANN's decisions be similarly constrained?
I don't know about the relationship of NASDAQ to the US Government - but it is clear that ICANN is very much the step child, albeit an unacknowledged one, of the US Department of Commerce. And it has been clear for years, and is becoming increasingly visible, that the US launders a goodly part of its internet policy through ICANN.
It would be interesting to learn from someone who knows the actual details and who might be able to cast some light on this.
ICANN has begun a meeting in Wellington, New Zealand.
Nice place New Zealand. But remote. Has anyone noticed how many years it has been since ICANN has had a meeting in the place where it has its legal home, California? Perhaps ICANN is afraid. And perhaps ICANN should be afraid, very afraid - I've spoken to people in the California government and they are aware of ICANN and its ill and exclusionary behavior towards citizens.
As a prelude to the meeting both Ross Rader and Susan Crawford wrote interesting notes on their blogs. I'll take a moment and respond those those.
Ross suggested that ICANN's GNSO is not conflicted because it represents all stakeholders. I don't agree. ICANN's GNSO, and ICANN generally, exclude the largest group of internet stakeholders - the community of internet users. The interest of that group, measured in terms of the cumulative financial impact and in the number of people affected, the "stake" of this community far outweighs that of the members of the GNSO by several orders of magnitude.
But it is a well accepted principle of nearly every legal system on the planet that collections of incumbent business interests ought not to have the life-and-death power over the attempts of others to enter the marketplace. The idea that incumbents can limit the entry of new players went out with the Guild system. Yet is that not what ICANN has become, a Guild, a place in which incumbent businesses (and a few other selected industrial bystanders, such as the intellectual property industry) have been given the power to be gatekeepers who permit or deny new entrepreneurs, new ideas, and new products?
And is that not also "regulation" in its worst and most heavy-handed sense?
Ross suggests that ICANN is not a regulator. But if we examine the aspects of domain name life upon which ICANN imposes mandatory conditions we see that ICANN has established a deeply intrusive and deeply controlling system of regulation. Among the things that ICANN imposes are minimal registry prices, astronomically high hurdles for new registry proposals to overcome, terms and conditions in registry and registrar contracts and users who acquire domain names, a dispute policy amounting to supra-national law of trademark-over-domain-name, a WHOIS policy that requires registrars and registries to publish their customer lists and that also is the largest and worst privacy abuse on the internet.
If that's not regulation then I don't know what regulation is.
Susan suggested that from the feedback she has received that there is pent-up demand for perhaps a dozen or less new Top-Level-Domains. I, and others, tend to feel that that number understates the actual demand by at least several thousand-fold.
An easy test would be for ICANN to put up on its website, in a place that people can actually find on its website, a request for statements of interest in obtaining a TLD. That web page should make it clear that ICANN is asking for those who would be interested under the following conditions:
Yup, that's it - those three conditions. The first condition should cover ICANN's costs of checking the second condition and of mechanically adding the TLD to the root zone file. (ICANN could charge a reasonable yearly maintenance fee - perhaps $100 - for updates to the name server records.) The second condition is really the only one necessary to protect the technical stability of the internet - see the new ICANN/Verisign contract for one definition of what "stability" means. And the third condition is there to indicate that the abusive behaviors of ICANN in the past should be discounted when making these statements of interest.
Under those conditions I'd put up my hand for my .ewe registry.
Now, back to the ICANN meeting itself.
Paul Twomey opened a hornet's nest of accumulated anger when he suggested that his discussion be off the record.
Paul: ICANN's began its life in secrecy with secret agreements made by ICANN's founder, Joe Sims. The fact of those agreements is well known - Sims once told me of their existence during a phone call when he told me that changes in the yet-to-be-formed ICANN were impossible because such changes would contravene those agreements. Then very soon after ICANN formed certain ICANN board members and officers adopted a stance right out of Orwell's Animal Farm - that in order to be "open" ICANN's board had to meet in secret.
Then ICANN went on through the years in that mode, secrecy piled on top of secrecy, closed meetings on top of closed meetings.
And then I was elected to ICANN's Board of Directors. ICANN felt that it should operate in secret even against its own Board of Directors! I tried to exercise my "absolute right" under the Law to take a look at ICANN's financials. ICANN had the audacity to try to deny me that right. I had to sue. I won, ICANN lost. You would think after the disastrous advice that ICANN's law firm gave it on that occassion, that ICANN might reconsider its choice of law firms. When I left the board I recommended (see Section 4.12 of Appendix B of http://www.cavebear.com/rw/senate-july-31-2003.htm) that ICANN make a deep review and potentially significantly reform its relationship with Jones-Day.)
Yet, apparently ICANN still does not easily open its books or its affairs to directors. And most of the directors have been wimps, not asking question much less requiring answers, not demanding that staff do what staff ought to do. ICANN directors generally treat their jobs on the ICANN Board of Directors as some sort of distant honorific in which the directors merely make polite nudging noises rather than actually using their plenary power and obligatory authority to actually direct the affairs of ICANN by making informed and independent decisions.
In addition, apparently, ICANN has not published any financial statements on its web pages for several years - I wonder whether ICANN has made its mandatory filings of its IRS form 990, a document that tax-exempt entities such as ICANN are required to make visible to the public else be subject to a daily accumulating fine.
Stepping over to another topic - apparently TLD registries are trying to make a land-grab by claiming that they have the exclusive rights to the internationalized versions of their strings. What an absurd idea. How greedy can these TLD registries get? Haven't they ever read the Grimms' tale of The Fisherman and His Wife?
Tell me this: What does "com" mean? It is not a word in English. It has been used as shorthand for "communications" (as in 3COM) or "commercial". What is the internationalized version of a non-word or acronym?
By-the-way, I own the domain name "cie.com" which, if viewed in French could be construed to mean the same as "com.com".
ICANN has issued its "draft" Strategic Plan.
It is most interesting for what it does not say.
First of all, nowhere does it suggest that ICANN is striving to be accountable to the community of internet users or to serve their needs. Instead it is full of words about how ICANN is going to serve its "stakeholders", which by definition excludes internet users.
Did you notice that the ALAC or at-large isn't even mentioned? I guess that even ICANN has realized that the ALAC is a failure - institutional cheer-leading Astroturf is hard to grow.
Nor does ICANN even begin to mention that it aspires to ensure that the upper tiers of the internet's domain name system will operate 24x7x365, quickly and accurately responding to query packets with response packets and doing so without prejudice against any query source or mining of the data stream for non-operational purposes.
I wonder whether a lot of the text for this plan came from Dilbert's Mission Statement Generator? (If you look quickly you may see an experimental tool to generate ICANN Strategic Objectives.)
It's also nice to know that not only is ICANN planning on continuing its excommunication of internet users, much less granting them the lofty position of "stakeholder", but that ICANN is apparently canonizing and transforming some of its current stakeholders into "key-stakeholders".
I notice that a bunch of DNS registrars finally decided that ICANN doesn't follow its own procedures.
Welcome to the club - you are over six years late to the party.
I filed a request for reconsideration on this same subject in 1999 - Request For Reconsideration 99-4
That request was, of course, rejected. ICANN rejected all requests without really answering them. Like the Pope, ICANN is infallible.
I subsequently submitted a request for independent review. But ICANN could not get its act together enough to form its independent review panel; so my request languished and eventually disappeared.
So DNS registrars - welcome to the club. I predict that your request will be dismissed by ICANN. Don't be surprised if you find that you must use the ol' 2x4 method to get your point across.
Bret Fausett's blog quoted Stratton Sclavos (CEO of Verisign) as saying that every week Verisign's registry gets 7,000,000 name registrations but that only 0.6% (42,000) of those last more than 5 days.
Wow!
In other words, for every "normal" registration transaction there are 167 five-day speculative registration transactions (plus an additional 167 drop transactions.) Thus for every normal registration there are 333 speculative transactions (i.e. one normal add transaction and 167 5-day add/drop transaction pairs.)
And, it seems from what I've been able to discover so far, but I'd certainly like clarification, that Verisign receives revenue only for the "normal" registration transactions but has to eat the cost of the 5-day add/drop transaction pairs.
Which, if true, means that the registry fee charged for each normal registration transaction has to cover the cost of 333 speculative registry transactions. That's a heavy and unjustifiable burden.
I have long assumed that the actual cost of registry operations is down in the 1 cent per year range. I'm not alone in this belief.
We know that Verisign isn't losing money with the $6 registry fee. And if we take into account the 1:333 ratio of normal-to-speculative registrations we see that the actual registry transaction fee has to be below $0.02, with the "normal" customer picking up the tab for 333 speculative transactions.
One of the reasons that Joe Sims, ICANN's architect-apparent of the ICANN-Verisign agreement, said in a posting at Circle-ID is that this new .com agreement was needed was to encourage Verisign to invest in infrastructure.
However, according to Sclavos statement, apparently the vast bulk of that infrastructure is there to support speculation rather than "normal" name registrations.
And that's not even counting the infrastructure that Verisign has to maintain to handle the stupid system of polling by registrars who circle like vultures waiting for names to drop.
In other words, those of us who consume domain names in the "normal" way, i.e. we use 'em for long terms, appear to be carrying an enormous burden (measured in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars per year in inflated registry fees) to support the ICANN allowed, if not ICANN created, speculative fever.
And yet, those of us who pay this tab get no vote in ICANN and simply get to pay the bill every year, year-in/year-out.
To the degree that my speculations (pun intended) are accurate, ICANN and its registry system are building up an enormous pool of money that one could claim has been dragged out of domain name buyers because ICANN is a combination in restraint of trade that can't be bypassed because ICANN occupies a monopoly position that is buttressed by a very shadowy governmental presence.
It is appalling to be reminded, once again, of how badly ICANN has damaged the internet. Rather than creating a domain name system that is rich in competition and innovation we find, after over half a decade of ICANN blundering, that the domain name system marketplace is devoid of real competition except among registries and even there the only real difference is price. Rather than low prices that reflect underlying economies of scale we see a system that grossly subsidizes speculators out of the pockets of normal internet users to the tune of several hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Under ICANN's hand innovative domain name providers have been arbitrarily denied the right to go into business and those who do get ICANN's blessing are required to follow rules that subordinate user and business choice to the desires of ICANN's "stakeholders" and to pay large fees to support ICANN's ever growing bureaucracy. And ICANN created FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) is used to besmirch those who suggest that ICANN's approach is as empty as the Emperor's fabled wardrobe.
Update: I've been wondering whether a decimal point has been slipped and that the real number is 6% rather then 0.6%. That is more consistent with a steady-state of roughly 40 to 50 million names in .com.
But even if the number is 6% that still means that to 420,000 paying registrations are supporting the cost of 6,580,000 freeloading speculative transactions. That's still an egregious subsidy being paid by normal domain name users.
Susan Crawford is interested in knowing who might be interested in operating a TLD.
She's among the best of ICANN's board members, and I'm glad she asked. Although my own belief is that she asked the wrong question - rather than asking "how many" I think Susan, and ICANN, should be asking why they erected and sustain a system that establishes ICANN as the once-and-final arbiter of who may, and who may not, enter the domain name marketplace.
Here is my response:
In answer to your question: I plan on doing a TLD.
But I'm not going to pay ICANN one damn cent for it.
I have a right to engage in business. ICANN has no right to deny me the opportunity to succeed or fail on my own merits.
There is utter destitution in the idea that ICANN is somehow protecting the technical stability of the internet - the ability of the internet to move packets from IP address to IP address and to resolve domain name queries with dispatch and accuracy.
All ICANN is doing is being a guild that limits its membership to those who will pay ICANN's tithe and limit their imaginations to ICANN's retrospective notions of what the internet is or can become.
Here's my business plan -- The .ewe Business Model - or - It's Just .Ewe and Me, .Kid(s)
ICANN's only legitimate role is to ask whether I'll abide by internet technical standards. And to that I say "yes". But I won't agree to ICANN's social engineering such as mandatory publication of my customer list, such as forcing my customers into the UDRP kangaroo-court ad hoc system of justice-for-just-us that favors trademarks over other rights to use names, or forcing my customers to other arbitrary and technically absurd rules, such as limiting registrations to one to ten year periods in one year increments.
ICANN's idea of reviewing TLDs is like the FAA asking airlines what brand of soda they serve while ignoring the ability of the airline to fly safely.
A couple of days ago I asked whether the proposed rehoming of IANA would include the L-root server as well.
Apparently not.
I received the following reply to my inquiry. Of course, this reply does not explain why this particular aspect of "the IANA function" should is different and otherwise not part of the RFI. (My own guess is that NTIA simply didn't think of it, and when I raised the question they called Marina del Rey and asked ICANN. And ICANN wouldn't want to lose a public-image plum like the IANA root server.)
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 08:39:31 -0500
From: BJohnson@doc.gov
To: Karl Auerbach
Cc: CSilverman@doc.gov
Subject: Re: Question on RFI on Reference-Number-DOCNTIARFI0001,
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
Dear Sir,
The matters under this RFI do not include the provision and/or operation of the
IANA DNS root server, L-root server.
Sincerely,
Brendon J. Johnson, CFCM, CCCM
Contracting Officer
U.S. Department of Commerce
Commerce Business Solutions
(202) 482-7401
Of all the forms of spammers, Joe Jobbers are among the worst.
Joe Jobbers are those who send spam that purports to come from real people. Those real people, who are entirely innocent, get buried in bounce notices, get blamed and labeled as spammers, and sometimes end up on the receiving end of hostile phone calls from angry recipients.
Joe Jobbers have been using my name for a while. And now there is a Joe Jobber out there who is spamming the US Congress with sex spam using my name.
Herodotus (b. 490 BC, d. 420 BC (approx.)) documented an appropriate punishment for Joe Jobbers:
In Book 1 of The Histories, at paragraph 92, it is recorded that King Croesus executed an ill-doer by "dragging him on a carding-comb".
Ouch!
(I do have SPF records in place for those who are willing to check whether it comes from one of my legitimate mail servers, but most receivers don't do the check. And the IETF is wandering around in the desert of procrastination about it's preferred alternative to SPF.)