[governance] ICANN taxes/fees

[Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law]

We both know people who run registries, perhaps you should talk to someone 
who runs one and isn't an incumbent (ie with a vested interest in making 
it sound harder than it is).  The technical problem is long-solved.  The 
"companies" part of the problem isn't especially hard either since you 
have a pretty small number of clients (registrars, rather than the 
public).  I would guess that it's actually much tougher to be a registrar 
on the companies end.

The 'hard' part of being a registry is being sufficiently reliable.  But 
Karl and others tell me the tech problem isn't very interesting or 
difficult.

As for registries that may die, this also is a solved problem 
intellectually: (1) ICANN can demand that data be escrowed with a trusted 
third party; (2) Even without (1) we let the market sort it out.  If there 
are many players, one failure isn't a big deal; and if maintaining the 
data has value, some other player takes it over.

On Wed, 7 Feb 2007, veni markovski wrote:

> At 08:43 PM 2/6/2007  -0500, Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law wrote:
>> It's based on RUNNING CODE.
>
> I think I asked Milton, not Michael :)
>

You asked on a public list...

> But then, again, even if what you say is correct (and I don't say it is), 
> that does not respond to the fact on what grounds someone would say that 
> "running registries is not difficult". I have some experience of running 
> companies, and dare to say that it's not an easy job. As for Viittorio's 
> comments - he actually made a good point - this kind of work is already being 
> done, so that's not an argument for the registries, but rather an argument 
> that anyone can do whatever they want today, even without new TLDs.
> And here's another question: if running registries is easy, and people get 
> "local" domains, what happens when the registry goes out of business, or the 
> person who is running it decides to move in another city, or country, or 
> stops working on computers? What will the users do with all the e-mails they 
> are getting at their "local" domain.
>
> veni
>
>

-- 
http://www.icannwatch.org   Personal Blog: http://www.discourse.net
A. Michael Froomkin   |    Professor of Law    |   froomkin at law.tm
U. Miami School of Law, P.O. Box 248087, Coral Gables, FL 33124 USA
+1 (305) 284-4285  |  +1 (305) 284-6506 (fax)  |  http://www.law.tm
                        -->It's warm here.<--
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance