SV: [governance] New dot com agreement changes USG-ICANN relationship

[Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law]

It also reminds us that at times the DoC is more interested (or, if you 
prefer, more effective) in securing the public interest than ICANN.

On Sat, 2 Dec 2006, Milton Mueller wrote:

> As of now the decision applies only to .com. But .com is half the global domain name market, and about 70% of the gTLD market. (That, by the way, is apparently what Veni means by it being "most valuable." And of course it's crazy to suggests that .com is an "American" domain, I guess he hasn't seen the millions of .com names registered by Chinese, German, British, French, etc., etc., etc., companies).
>
> Looking to the future, it is unclear whether we will remain in the world of ".com exceptionalism" or whether this becomes a precedent. The decision suggests that on any controversial, high-stakes issue, the buck cannot stop with ICANN. The US Commerce Dept. is *permanently* a critical feature of the gTLD regulatory process.
>
> I do not think DoC would claim final authority over smaller, newer gTLDs. But remember that VeriSign is not just the .com operator, it is also the operational source of the root zone file. And the governing document for both is the old Cooperative Agreement that goes back to the NSF days and was taken over by Commerce in 1997. What this recent decision does is make it clearer than ever that we are never getting rid of that mechanism.
>
>>>> Wolfgang Kleinwächter <wolfgang.kleinwaechter at medienkomm.uni-halle.de> 12/2/2006 3:49:02 AM >>>
> Dear Milton,
>
> thanks very much for posting this.
>
> What are the consequences of this statement? Does it mean that the DOC will claim final authority over all gTLDs? Or is the .co,m case just an exception, unique and can be explained only with the special history? And what about .net? The 2000 contract included both .org and .net. The original idea was to allocate .org and .net to two new registries to stimulate competition. But .net was re-allocated to VeriSign. If the DOC says it is respionsible for "compeition" does it mean the .net contract needs also approval and has to be reconsidered? Or is competition seen as an internal US affa5ri, ignoring the rest of the world?
>
> Best regards
>
> wolfgang
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> Fra: Milton Mueller [mailto:Mueller at syr.edu]
> Sendt: fr 01-12-2006 20:01
> Til: Governance
> Emne: [governance] New dot com agreement changes USG-ICANN relationship
>
>
>
> ICANN's 8-year experiment in nongovernmental governance of the
> Internet's domain name system all but came to an end November 30. The
> U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it, and not ICANN, would be
> the ultimate "decider" when it comes to dot com. Dot com is the largest
> and most valuable Internet top level domain, accounting for about 50% of
> the global market.
>
> Read the complete story at the IGP site:
> http://internetgovernance.org/news.html#ICANNVeriSignSettlement_113006
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