On Fri, 27 Feb 1998, Patrik =?iso-8859-1?Q?F=E4ltstr=F6m?= wrote:
> >If pressed, he might waffle on this. But it would be sensible to
> >assume that he meant what he said and that this is the position of
> >the UK government, who currently hold the European Union presidency.
> >
> >I believe that you would get much the same response from DG IV, the
> >European Commission's department dealing with competition.
>
> The problem is that technically speaking, the DNS is a strict hierarchy,
> and at the top, you have one root, and one only. You have TLDs, and out of
> each string of characters, you can only have one and one only. Those are
> things that can not be changed by any anti-competition people that exist.
> Because of that, one have to listen to what arguments they have for the
> problem they see.
This isn't a technical argument. It's political. You can win the
technical argument, at least as you understand it, but lose the
political one. Unfortunately losing the political argument means
that you have lost the game.
At the Department of Trade and Industry meeting there were a number of
POC/CORE types present who argued strongly that competition was not
acceptable. Even if their arguments were technically persuasive (and I
am not persuaded), they could not succeed politically. The DTI will
not support a policy that is labelled "no competition" or "competition
is unaccepable".
The DTI will certainly listen to an argument that the green paper is
proposing a system of multiple monopolies. The Commission will also
be responsive to this.
> >That doesn't make any sense. The CORE shared registry was designed to
> >host many TLDs.
>
> What I meant was that it can only be one (not two or three) registries per
> TLD. That said, it can be the case that one registry handles more than one
> TLD. The number of registries can not be greater than the number of TLDs.
It would be technically possible to build a system that could spread
one TLD over several registries. However, this would be much more
expensive than a one-registry-per-TLD system.
> >Speaking for myself (and not quoting the guy from the DTI) I think
> >that you miss the point. If there is only one CORE, it will have one
> >set of policies. It is for all practical purposes certain that some
> >policies will be poor. If there is no alternative registry, there
> >will be little incentive to change its bad policies.
>
> Policy of the registry itself is the one single thing that is in the
> monopoly, I agree with that. I have though personally been convinced for
> some time that the amount of work and policing POC and PAB have to do on
> CORE is far less troublesome than the policing one have to do if it was the
> case that the registrars and registries were totally different bodies (i.e.
> the registrars can not police "simple" things of the registry) and if it
> was the case that we could have disputes between registries and registrars,
> all with different policies.
This argument doesn't hold water. The .UK and .FR registries run
independently. There is nothing to police between them. They are
simply independent registries.
Why should two gTLD registries require any greater level of coordination?
> >Similarly on price. I think that you are being idealistic in claiming
> >that prices will inevitably fall. If you look at the monopoly nTLD
> >registries across Europe, you will find many different pricing policies.
> >Some registries are run very well and have low prices to registrars;
> >some are run very badly, have bad policies, and have high prices.
>
> The only shared nTLD systems I know of is the UK one and the Swedish one.
I understood that DENIC ran a shared registry.
> In Sweden they have only started up, so we don't know what the result will
> be, and in UK it seems to work, and people seems to like that system -- and
> the prices seems to go down. I can be misinformed about UK though. In
The UK nTLD registry runs very well and the registrars are quite well
pleased with it. Prices have certainly fallen and, as I understand it,
will fall further. The managing director has said publicly that he
believes that the natural price of a registration is in the very low,
a few dollars a year.
> >Where CORE sits on the spectrum will be largely determined by chance.
> >In the longer run, I would certainly expect a slow upward drift in
> >internal costs. Bureaucracies are like that.
>
> Hmmmmm....I see your point, but as you say, I do think the registrars will
> police that part of CORE, and see that that does not happen.
They will try, I am sure. ;-)
-- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015
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