[CPWG] ... and still one more comment

[Roberto Gaetano]

Dear all,
Still for the sake of completeness, may I note that one of the legitimate concerns that have been expressed is that ICANN should stay away from private business transactions and not take decisions that would interfere with the free market dynamics.
May I respectfully observe that ICANN has already “interfered” very heavily on the business based on .org.
The first time was back in the early days, when ICANN forced the registry/registrar split, de facto taking control of the relationship with the registrants away from Network Solutions, the registry of .org at that time.
The second time was when ICANN forced the rebid of the .org contract, de facto taking it away from Verisign, who had taken over NetSol.
In both cases there was in the decision a component of “acting for the benefit of the greater community” while damaging the interests of an operator. In the first case the rationale for the split was the introduction of competition among registrars (the registrants enjoyed a drop of retail price of a .org domain to about 20% of the previous price), in the second case .org was put in the hands of a non-profit (PIR has since then proactively taken decisions for the benefit of the user community like fighting the long tail and the wildcard, in direct opposition to the commercial registries like Verisign).
So, IMHO, ICANN has got its hands into the market dynamics already, and it might be hard to prove that this case is substantially different. To be fair, we do have one difference, that is that in the previous cases ICANN was shielded from lawsuits by the authority of the US Government, while now it is on its own.
As we say in Italian: “You wanted the bike, now you pedal”.
Cheers,
Roberto