North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Verisign to sell Network Solutions

  • From: Owen DeLong
  • Date: Thu Oct 16 13:26:35 2003



--On Thursday, October 16, 2003 5:08 PM +0100 [email protected] wrote:



So...correct me if I'm wrong here...does this mean that the registry



services



operations and the GTLD maintenance operations for .com/.net will be



owned by



different companies?



Yep. And it means that Verisign business is no longer
based so much on serving customers but more on leveraging
various monopoly rights that they have such as ownership
of .com and ownership of the main root CAs whose
certificates are bundled with Microsoft's OS.




They don't OWN .com or .net.  They have a contract to administer
them in the interests of the public trust placed in them by USDOC
and ICANN.  They keep pretending they OWN them and that is a big
part of the problem.  We must not buy into this or they WILL end
up effectively owning them.  That will be even worse than what we
are seeing today.




Isn't that what we wanted all along?



Uhhh... sort of, but I guess most folks really just wanted
the whole domain name business to be handled in an open
honest and fair manner. This latest move by Verisign doesn't
make any substantial advance in that direction.




In fact, it is arguably regressive.




The fact is that we have created Verisign's .COM monopoly
by treating .com domains as the cool thing to have and we
are sustaining Verisign's .COM monopoly by not educating our
customers and our friends about the alternative domains
that are available.




While there is some validity to this, the reality is that there are
a lot of existing .com identities that should not have to change just
because Verisign is greedy.  ICANN should work with good lawyers to
develop a better contract for managing the .com and .net zones in the
public interest and entrust that contract to an appropriate not-for-proffit
organization as a replacement for Verisign's current abuses.  They should
attempt to expidite the transition, but, may be stuck with Verisgin until
2006/2007.  Certainly, there should be no extension of Verisign's current
contract, and, the orderly transition of the registry should be started
as soon as possible.


Owen