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Originally Posted by carlton  Couple more observations. With the profound dissent voiced two years ago regarding biz/info/org contracts, it is beyond alarming that ICANN are back again repeating the same mistake with the com/net Verisign contract. Something stinks of extreme corruption.
They didn't do us a favor two years ago. They chose the only legitimate course of action that any competent, fair-minded regulatory body could make. As George points out, the same irrefutable logic that steered their decision two years ago ... stands now. What disturbs me is that ANYONE in ICANN would allow this ridiculous contract error to even get past the first draft. Something stinks of extreme corruption.
The problem is that the absence of price control language in the contract effectively FAILS to offer you the necessary protections that will keep Verisign from jacking up your domain renewals. |
Indeed, what was so sneaky about this, both last time, and this time, is that there's no language in the contract that says "ICANN approves a registry operator engaging in tiered pricing." What they slyly did was simply remove the old language that had the pricing caps. It's an act of "omission."
If you didn't know:
a) what to look for in the first place, i.e. that the pricing cap section was missing, and
b) that you had to look at terms in OTHER contracts (i.e. the .com equal treatment clauses)
then it would have been easy to miss the implications. ICANN and registry operators probably count on this -- it's clear registrants weren't part of the team drafting these bad contracts.
Once you remove pricing caps in one gTLDs, then you have to remove them in other gTLDs that ask for equal treatment, unless you can demonstrate a good reason (right now some
sponsored gTLDs, which have a defined community overseeing it, like .aero or .coop or .travel have no pricing controls, but the "good reason" that one can use if .com/net/org/biz/info try to get the same for themselves is that they are
unsponsored gTLDs, open to anyone, and thus can't be considered the same for the equal treatment clause to be triggered).
Then, once you've removed them in .com, one quickly asks "How would one make the most money with pricing unregulated?" Tiered pricing is the obvious solution.
If ICANN had simply said "We want VeriSign to introduce .tv style pricing for .com" on their homepage, they would have seen a huge outcry. But, through (a) and (b) above, they've said the exact same thing. It's like they wrote it in the Achumawi language:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achumawi_language
which has only 8 people in the world who understand it. That's typical ICANN "transparency", to say exactly what you're getting, but formulate it in such a way that you need to be able to read Achumawi to understand it!