A couple of listeners have asked about the e-mail message I received. Here's the text that I discussed on today's podcast:

When the constituency model was first formed, there was concern expressed about capture. It's quite interesting to see that those concerns were valid and that most groups as part of the GNSO Council work are little more than a few busy bodies who are calling the shots without any true representation of the communities they are supposed to represent. No one seems to care about that. I challenge you to show me any evidence that the views of the Council represent the broader view of domain name registrants. The reality of the matter is that they do not. Instead they represent the interests of those who are enjoying the power they think they have through processes that have in my opinion been abused over the years. Or they are enjoying the opportunity to act as a regulator of registries and registrars. Or they think they are looking out for the small guy. As it is, the small guy, the registrant, has the best opportunity to express his/her opinion but it is not through the GNSO and probably never will be; they can do so through their buying choices and there are quite a few choices for TLDs and hopefully more in the future.

Is it a fair comment? Is the market the better place for registrants to express their choices?

Bret

For as much as I am interested in the domain game I know surprisingly little about the effectiveness of the GNSO so I couldn't say if I thought the comment was fair. As a general rule, when discussing the actions of many people, using terms like "no one" or "everybody" seems to taint the fairness factor as the broad brush glides over the wrong people.

The juicy part is whether or not the market can or should represent the views of registrants. There are so many factors to consider when determining if the market can be a fair place for consumers to make their opinions known. The web hosting industry seems to be a good example of letting the market work things out. But the web hosting industry operates on a level playing field with true competition and little negative impact for changing one's mind about their provider.

TLDs on the other hand, with the current management structure seem to fall out of the market driven model as a fair basis for consumer voice. We only have one reasonable choice for where our domains are managed on the Registry level. I understand the context here surrounds shoping TLDs and Registry operators but the cost of switching TLDs if often extremely prohibitive. Two points:

1. The .com enjoys the widest acceptance across the internet users base. Although I've always promoted vpop.net as our destination site most of my customers go to vpop.com (thankfully I own both!), likely due to a subconscious and automatic response the the environment.

2. Recovering from a change in TLD could cost millions of dollars. Think about AOL.com -- Customers will have email addresses that need to be changed, millions of dollars in branding will be lost, search engine placement will vanish, AOL employee business cards will need to be reprinted. And the list goes on. It could cost AOL $1billion to make such a change. Much less cost for my little company but still a huge portion of my revenue would be lost.

Because of these (and many more) issues, the market can't effectively use its force to get a fair deal. This is why it is so important that *effective* oversight be in place. Believe me, I'm typically against this sort of thing but given today's structure, it seems the only reasonable path.

If the structure of control were to change I could see the market operating as the voice of consumers. But I think that would take the acceptance of an alternate root system before we'd see the current operators change their ways. I dread that notion but sometimes I think it's the only way out of our current mess.

I'll wrap this up with a brief comparison to the current Registry mess. If you live in the U.S. and have a phone at home you'll remember when we had to pay per minute to call a neighbor. Some regulations provided relief for home users to make local calls more reasonable but calling someone across town could cost you a fortune. Enter high speed internet and VOIP... now you can talk all you want for a flat fee, to anywhere in the U.S. (and sometimes Canada). What I mean is, the default telcos for specific areas saw that Vonage was going to eat their lunch so they lowered their prices and restrictions. We're moving away from lack of choice but before that, when there was no reasonable alternative, consumers had no way of using their voice (pardon the pun) to induce market change. With the Registry structure now, we're close to the situation that we all endured in the pre-voip days.