[CCWG-Accountability] [Area 4] WS4 Initial Scenarios

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

Sarah,

I'm copying your question and my response to the main 
CCWG-Accountability mailing list, as the discussion of scenarios has 
been limited.


> Thanks for sending this. Looks okay. I am just having trouble 
> understanding #8 (Technology competing with DNS) and why the 
> consequence would be the same as that of #5.


Scenario #5 posits a industry specific financial crisis, and anticipates 
a significant reduction in domain sales generated revenues, hence 
registrar and registry failure, where those registrars and registries 
business models fail under reduced demand, hence continuity costs to the 
corporation which has made some "stability", hence persistence guarantee 
to the remaining registrants.

Scenario #8 posits a technology competing with DNS, and anticipates the 
same consequence as Scenario #5, as you've observed.

Distinct root causes are posited which have indistinguishable consequences.

Turning to the root causes hypotheticals for Scenario #5 -- domain 
industry specific events affecting business models ...

Suppose a loss of return on investment for the industry specific 
pay-per-click business model -- the ppc business model coupled with 
"domain tasting" caused the .com zone to grow by a third. "Tasting" was 
ended by Board action a decade ago, if I recall correctly, so a decline 
in PPC could reduce the largest source of recurring revenues by a third 
in the space of one or two renewal cycles, with failures of 
PPC-dependent business models (I'm not suggesting that either the .com 
operator, or the corporation, are PPC-dependent businesses).

Similarly, suppose second level domain registration of trade marks by 
third-parties no longer presents a dilution liability for trade mark 
holders. Again, and industry specific collapse of business models 
predicated on either trade mark exploitation or trade mark protection is 
certain, with a loss of recurring revenues to the corporation.

Turning to the root causes hypotheticals for Scenario #8 -- competitive 
technologies associating resources and identifiers ...

Suppose a commodity platform vendor or consortium of vendors offer a 
resource and identifier association mechanism with user uptake 
competitive with the existing DNS mechanism and market. To the degree 
the non-DNS resource and identifier association mechanism obtains market 
share, the DNS market actors -- registries and their sales channels, the 
registrars, and the corporation, will loose revenue.

If you are unfamiliar with non-DNS resource and identifier association 
mechanism, there was hosttables, which today could be distributed more 
timely than the every-three-days frequency we made distributions from 
SRI prior to the conversion to distributed lookup (DNS), meeting most 
use cases other than those depending on "rapid update" -- at zero cost 
to the registrants during that period. We should expect that researchers 
around the world are investigating successors to service and/or resource 
location applications -- some pursuing string-similar search, which has 
obviously matured into an industry larger than the DNS industry, and 
some pursuing alternate forms of loosely coupled distributed lookup.

I trust that this explains why both #5 and #8 have recurring revenues 
reduction consequences in an otherwise unaffected general economy.

Finally, a reminder that SOIs must be submitted ...

Eric

On 1/5/15 11:28 PM, Sarah Kiden wrote:
> Hello Eric,
>
> Thanks for sending this. Looks okay. I am just having trouble 
> understanding #8 (Technology competing with DNS) and why the 
> consequence would be the same as that of #5.
>
> Please clarify.
>
> Thanks,
> Sarah
>
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Eric Brunner-Williams 
> <ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net <mailto:ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net>> wrote:
>
>     Colleagues,
>
>     Attached please find an initial set of scenarios, in two pages, in
>     .pdf and .docx formats.
>
>     Feedback via email please, either to me directly
>     (ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net <mailto:ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net>) or to
>     the WS4 sublist (ccwg-accountability4 at icann.org
>     <mailto:ccwg-accountability4 at icann.org>).
>
>     Thanks in advance,
>     Eric Brunner-Williams
>     Eugene, Oregon
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     Ccwg-accountability4 mailing list
>     Ccwg-accountability4 at icann.org <mailto:Ccwg-accountability4 at icann.org>
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>
>

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