ICANN has produced a revised version of the controversial new dotcom agreement with VeriSign – that will give VeriSign complete control of all dotcoms forever.
To ICANN's credit, it has made a few changes. And it is in the almost impossible situation that despite being the deciding body in this contract, it is the weakest leg of the stool in negotiations because the contract that is being renewed was drawn up between VeriSign and the US government (DoC).
But at the same time, ICANN staff are absolutely desperate to get this deal through because without VeriSign breathing down their necks their lives will be so much easier. And that bias shows. It makes you question how strong they were when in negotiations with VeriSign, because VeriSign knew it had them by the short and curlies.
The result is that VeriSign still gets an enormous amount of control and power that in the wider, objective sense it has no right to. Why on earth should VeriSign be given control of the dotcom domain ad infinitum? ICANN – and everyone else – is hoping of course that with search engines rather than the DNS now used as the main way of navigating the Net, that new top-level domains will gradually diminish the importance of dotcoms.
I think that is inevitable but at the same time dotcoms will always have a cachet. They will be more resistant to market pressures that any other domains. VeriSign is basically sitting on top a goldmine and ICANN has decided it doesn't have the strength to kick it off.
It's not good for the Net, but the whole agreement is a step forward at least. The ability for VeriSign to increase its prices has been cut down slightly but not really. Likewise the extra registrar payments have been cut down but not really. It's a revised agreement of fudges that will probably go through.
Who will be pissed off though is CFIT – the Coalition for ICANN Transparency – which represents companies that grab and sell expiring domain names. VeriSign intends to take control of all expiring dotcoms and build its own system for auctioning them off. CFIT has fought very effectively against this happening – but it is still there in the contract.
[Update: I've just spoken to CFIT (about 30 minutes after this post was first posted).]
Unsurprisingly, it is not happy. Spokesman John Berard said the three primary concerns of CFIT are still there in the new agreement, and promised the organisation would continue to “pursue every option we have”.
Those concerns are:
- The additional cost thanks to VeriSign being allowed to raise prices
- The presumptive right of renewal
- The “unfettered encroachment” of VeriSign into other registry services
Berard also he felt that VeriSign's “line in the sand” – basically saying this is as far as it is prepared to go – will act as a great recruiting tool for CFIT, and described the whole ICANN-VeriSign agreement as merely “Exhibit A” in the wider transparency issue against ICANN.
CFIT has received the Freedom of Information documents it requested wrt to VeriSign, ICANN, the US government and the dotcom and dotnet agreements. It has around 1,000 pages of heavily redacted (blacked out) documents and is figuring out what to do with what it has. And try to find out what it has not been given and why.
CFIT is also going to push very heavily for the decision on the VeriSign agreement to not be taken before the ICANN Wellington meeting. “This issue is too important to be done over the phone and among themselves – why do it on the phone when there is a big public meeting just three weeks later?” I agree wholeheartedly.
So, how important is this contract in the whole wider Internet scheme of things? Very, very important. It sorts out the enormously divisive argument between VeriSign and ICANN, and it gives ICANN the authority it craves. However it also gives VeriSign the means by which it can continue to disproportionately control what happens on the Internet.
Ideally, VeriSign would have been forced to assume its correct role in this global medium. Through judicious spending of money on the right people however it has been granted an unjustified importance.
Make no mistake either – if the US government had had the courage to go through with its original intention to write itself out of control of the Internet, this deal would never have gone through.
The whole deal still stinks but with any luck it will be the last of the great scam deals struck for control of the Internet. This really is a new era for the Internet, as Paul Twomey promised.
