ICANN public comment period for the .com Registry Agreement renewal ends on Thursday April 26th.
As you know, under the terms of the renewal contract Verisign will be able to raise their wholesale price on .com registration 7% in 4 out of the next 6 years.
You can submit you comments on the contract to com-renewal@icann.org.
You will get an email from ICANN acknowledging the comment (this may take a little while) You have to reply to that email for your comment to be posted, received and published by ICANN. If you do not respond to the email your comment will not be counted.
Under ICANN “new” comment period methodology, there’s an initial comment period — the one that ends on April 26, and then there’s a second “reply” period, where those who commented in the first part can respond to issues raised in the first main comment period; one wants to be sure to get one’s comments in by the end of the first comment period, as that’s the real deadline, not the “reply close” date.
Existing comments can be read here.
As always George Kirikos is on top of the issue and has posted his comment as offers anyone who doesn’t want to spend the time to compose their own comment can adopt all or part of George’s comment.
While the comments may have no directly impact in that ICANN is likely to rubber stamp the VeriSign renewal contract as the orginal contract does have a presumptive renewal provision, a broad set of submissions might send a message to the NTIA/DOC/DOJ that ICANN does not have the support of domain name registrants when it comes to renewing the dot-com agreement with VeriSign on such anti-competitive terms.
If people don’t go “on the record” with their concerns, ICANN/VeriSign are happy to go about their business claiming that no one objected to the contract.
Thanks Mike.
If everyone that normally posts comments on 3D Names, .co rebuttals to Robert Cline, etc. took a moment to write in, we’d have hundreds of comments “on the record” against the anti-competitive dot-com agreement that VeriSign and ICANN are imposing upon an unwilling public.
I’m going to be posting my comments tonight
People who think they currently “own” .COM domains may be in for a surprise.
The NEW .COM service grants true ownership (physical possession).
Commenting to ICANN and Verisign endorses their game. They do as they please.
.COM to be Migrated to Peer-2-Peer DNS without ICANN and Verisign
The current .COM services will eventually fall by the wayside.
Internet Insiders are currently meeting Off-Shore in Geneva Switzerland and are discovering they are not up to speed on the latest technology.
ICANN has delayed the new gTLD program but has no plans to refund money.
The Internet Community moves forward without ICANN and Verisign
Just wrote ICANN a response.
ICANN is just sickening. I can’t wait to see them get theirs one day.
I posted, but it won’t show up right away. But there’s a company in China selling their prison stuff, if anyone’s interested in a pair of cuffs while commenting on Verisign. Somewhat of a relational metaphor, if you ask me. LOL!
The comment archives update roughly once per hour. Danny’s comment is now showing up.
INTERNET HALL of FAME INDUCTEES
Were “Domainers” missed ?
Have put in my comment which reads:
Firstly VeriSign is now owned by Symantec, which materially changes their position and introduces conflicts of interest. There is only one dotcom, but there are many Online Security firms….
Secondly, VeriSign and Symantec have admitted to having a “Once the horse has bolted” approach to internet security. (I have the email to prove it).
This simply cannot be good when dealing with what is by far the largest slice of internet territory and activity!
Essentially they will allow users, including trademarks, to be defrauded and only implement preventative measures once a breach is reported!
Just because the domaining world has chosen to back the dotcom, this does NOT mean VeriSign were the architects of this success!
DJ
the number of comments submitted to the icann list says it all.
ignorance equals bliss. public ignorance, ICANN/registry bliss.
the only way they manage to pull this (what some call a “monopoly”) off is because there is public ignorance. technical ignorance.
i could teach someone with no computer knowledge, how to serve a registry of names in a single day. it is not difficult. with the internet speeds people typically have today, they could download all the world’s dns-reported ip addresses in one day. and with the RAM they have they could serve millions of records. the whole procedure is like getting a copy of the telephone book. it can be simplified and automated.
certainly, there are costs in processing registrations and maintaining a database of registrants. those costs were recognised by the us govt at the outset, back in the late 80’s. and eventually there were several contractors handling it. they were essentially the first registries. that number unfortunately shrank to one: network solutions. then there was a true monopoly. the clinton gov’t stepped in. and creating icann was the solution.
a one-time cost for a domain name is reasonable. this is to cover the administration costs of the registrant database. we might call this a _setup_ fee.
but the cost of serving the names themselves to client applications, e.g. your email app or your web browser, is very small. if it is portrayed as being significant that is only because some parties want to keep it centralised. of course it is still somewhat decentralised in practice, to increase the number of points of failure.
this cost of serving the data could be even more distributed that it already is (e.g. moving access points from datacenters even closer to the network’s edge). the “server costs” could be borne by the community. such decentralisation does not weaken the stability of the internet, it _strengthens_ it. what would paul baran say about centralisation? ask yourself – why does this _public_ data need to be served piecemeal from a centralised regime like icann and it registries?
there are no rules against decentralisation. it’s just propaganda aka fud fed to network admins that keeps the status quo in place.
with internet speeds as they are for so many customers today, periodically downloading a list of the ip addresses for all “leaf” authoritative servers on the dns tree is not unthinkable. when you have that, you no longer need the registries nor icann for day to day operations. you instantly have disaster recovery should the internet dns go down.
as such, imo, the _ongoing_ fees to _existing_ registrants are suspect.
assuming their information in the regsitrant database does not change from year to year, what are existing registrants paying for?
sure millions of clients may be hitting your servers and you have massive dns traffic, billions of queries a day. but if those clients have no knowledge of any other way to retrieve the information they are requesting, why should your statistics be in any way relevant in any way to your “unique capabilities”?
again, i could show a non-techical person in single day how to set up a dns server using commodity hardware that serves a billion queries per day… albeit not to the entire world (why would i want to do that?) as far as serving dns records, what one registry can do, another resgitry can do.
technical ignorance. and registry bliss.
we can’t blame verisign for taking what they can get.
but we can blame icann for not protecting the consumer.
“ask yourself – why does this _public_ data need to be served piecemeal from a centralised regime like icann and it registries?”
1. To pay for ICANN to continue to promote the centralized regime ?
2. To pay for all the I* insiders to travel around the world to lavish galas ?
3. To pay for all the I* insiders to claim deep security costs protecting the data ?
[Check out the one million paid by the US DHS to the ICANN Chairman’s Company for DNSSEC]
4. To entice more players to pay $185,000 + $25,000/yr to enter the game ?
5. To pay thugs to derail efforts to deploy NON-centralized solutions ?
It is expensive to protect monopolies and cartels. “Public ignorance” is expensive to cultivate and perpetuate. The I* insiders are masters of that game.
to quote a dnssec snake oil salesman: “dnssec solves a problem i’m not having.”
i want to verify the authoritative server i’m connecting to and secure the connection. if i can do that i need not worry so much about the records i get. because i’ve already placed trust in that server as being the right place to get the ip info from.
that solution may come but it won’t come from the ietf/isoc/etc crowd. and that is very telling.
dnssec like ipv6 accomplishes nothing for the internet at large unless every end point adopts it. such is huge burden, insurmountable perhaps, with no discernable benefit (except that found in the hollow claims of consultants). it simply will not happen.
not to mention that ipv6, being the product of committee, is so loaded down with “features” that if widely adopted would likely create more problems than it purports to solve. because it introduces heaps of needless complexity. and we’ve all seen where that leads us. maybe it’s job security for some.
what we do know is that some people just want to sell stuff (under the guise of “solutions” for problems they themselves create). and others actually want to fix stuff that is in use right now and is broken. the later are the unsung heros of the internet.
let us pray that we can distinguish one from the other.
DomNics
Verisign is a public company.
You can buy shares in it.
Symbol
VRSN
Verisign sold its cert’s business to Symantec but retained the domaining rights business which includes the .com, .net .tv and .cc contract
“Verisign is a public company. You can buy shares in it.”
————–
There is a school-of-thought that argues that is a Good.Thing.
Unfortunately, the I* insiders create for-profit and non-profit companies that are off-shore and out of reach for investors. Only the I* insiders benefit. The decisions are made by I* insiders in their star-chambers. Claims are made that it is all public benefit, open and transparent. It has always been that way, their way.
The U.S. Government could require that all gTLD Registries are SEC-regulated public companies. The general public could also favor buying domains from public companies.
People have been mislead that the private non-profit companies are “better”. The I* insiders continue to promote that group-think. It is amazing how many
people in the USA and abroad are drawn into the socialistic Internet Hall of . SHAME.
There is a school-of-thought that argues that is a Bad.Thing, but it thrives.
I didn’t understand you much when you were Big Lie and this comment makes no sense at all
The U.S. Government (NTIA, FCC, FTC) could require that ALL gTLD IANA Registries are SEC-regulated public companies AND based solely in the .USA.
How many ICANN gTLD Applicants would be prepared for that requirement?
My interpretation of Hall of .SHAME’s ramblings is:
– that the term “non-profit” is used liberally in public communincations to make people think things are being done for the public benefit, when the real reason for the not-for-profit corporate structure is to ensure healthy profit for a small group of investors (“the I* insiders”), tax-free, with minimal reporting requirements to “outsiders”
and
– onlookers to the TLD biz probably do not realise that many of the current gTLD’s are (and no doubt many prospective gTLD’s are intended to be) run by offshore entities, e.g., Afilias in Ireland. Not sure what the implications of that are. Is that a good thing?
Correct me, Hall of .SHAME, if my interpretation is wrong.
Verisign on the other hand does have some level of transparency as they do have reporting requirements, as a public company. Is that a good thing?
It is noble that some feel the responsibility to post ICANN public comments. There are always some who will fight the good fight. More power to them.
But, a likely reason for such a low response rate is that many of us have the opinion that it simply won’t matter.
To many of us, it looks as if ICANN views themselves as beyond reproach …an Ultimate Power beyond that of governments, with the attitude that they can do anything they want.
There could be such a massive flood of public comments that it took their servers down and they would probably ignore it all and continue on their current path.
The only good thing about this “all powerful” attitude is that it may eventually be their undoing.
Today’s the last day to submit comments.