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Verisign's legally mandated bias

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ICANN's SECSAC is holding a second consultation dealing with Verisign's seizure of the .com and .net zones. This consultation will focus on several presentations by Verisign outlining their planning, data collection and analysis of their experiences during the short period that Sitefinder was live.

In a not-completely-unrelated development, a consortium of registry operators for the unsponsored TLDs (.com, .info, .name, .net, .org and .pro) have withdrawn from the formal policy development process that was intended to create a predictable procedure for the introduction of new registry services like Sitefinder.

This policy development initiative was widely viewed as a positive initiative by ICANN that would have allowed the community to put boundaries around how registry operators can and can't leverage the monopoly grant that we have given them while ensuring that registry operators would not be put at a competitive disadvantage.

Neither of these situations is entirely appropriate. Verisign does not deserve "equivalent airtime" - they had ample opportunity to provide their input into the first consulation alongside the rest of the community. Worse, the registry operators seem to be implying that they are more important than the other voices in ICANN's policy development process - or at least, that they deserve more of a voice than the other individual participants. In both cases, the economic self-interest of these parties exceeds their capability to make the kind of contribution that we need right now.

In his recent book "The Future of Ideas", Larry Lessig outlines why the registry operators deserve special treatment, just not the kind that they are expecting.

"Corporations have a duty to their shareholders. Their job is to make money. If the opportunies present themselves, they will, and should, change their views. They are not institutions of public policy...

...we should not treat what corporations say is good policy as what is good public policy. We should treat them as statements by individuals who are required by law to be self-serving. This is not just "bias" - this is legally mandated bias."

This is not to say that commercial entities don't have a place ICANN's policy development process, but rather, that we need to start treating their input slightly differently. This is especially true when it comes to biased input coming from an artificial (but necessary) monopoly. Registry operators cannot be made up to become the sacred cow of the DNS, but we can make sure that they have an appropriate voice in the process. Most importantly, the registry operators need to be put into a position where they can more efficiently fulfill the wishes of the communities that they each serve without jeopardizing the future of our network in the pursuit of their commercial interests.

See this post as it first appeared on Blogware.

2 comments

Comments are closed - these are kept exactly as they were left.

  1. (name not saved), October 14, 2003

    .pro is an unsponsored TLD? I'd say .pro is an unimplemented TLD at this point.
    40+ applicants turned down, and .pro still hasn't gone live? It takes a lot of nerve for them to sign on to this.

  2. (name not saved), October 14, 2003

    Might a solution to the VeriSign conundrum be found by not letting the operator of the Registry function also as a Registrar but letting the Registry operator make money in some of these other ways that VeriSign is trying? Like Site Finder and WLS? Let them add value further down the chain than the registrars. A Site Finder type service can be run without interfering with other people's use of the error message by returning the error message as expected AND providing the Site Finder URL where appropriate so the user agent can follow it if it wants to.
    If VeriSign had a monopoly in places where it makes sense to have one but did not ALSO compete with regular registrars, then maybe everybody - us users, registrars and Verisign - could come out ahead?
    We would have to monitor, as we are trying to do now, any new services that VeriSign wanted to provide, to make sure that they didn't interfer with what everybody else is doing - e.g. make sure that they don't break the end-to-end principle but rather do all their stuff transparently, essentially as an edge service. We would of course have to let them do some things so that they could earn some money and wouldn't have to be paid out of the public purse. This would presumably add some overhead to the registrars and in one way or another to all users, but if registrars and users are in charge of monitoring the beast, it might just work!