[CPWG] Meeting Details - Today: The Future of .ORG: Community Engagement' Webinar

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Sun, 1 Mar 2020 at 05:02, Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:

There’s registry/registrar separation, most of the large DNS operators
> aren’t also registries or registry services providers, etc.


I just remembered a point from long ago when the original gTLD round was in
play. IIRC Google was floating the idea of starting a registry that would
give away 2nd level domains for free and/or bundle them in GSuite (as it
had already done with email, cloud file storage, productivity software,
etc). I recall hard opposition within ICANN at the idea of a registry being
able to freely distribute domains without registrars getting their cut. The
idea eventually died because of the barriers in place *caused* by the
forced separation of producer and reseller. The concept of separation was
invented to address the domination of dot-com and create a level playing
field for resellers -- but it becaume an innovation-killer when TLD
expansion came around. Attempts to implement the Dell direct-to-consumer
model for domains died in their sleep.

That may have changed by now but it's too late -- the innovators have moved
on. There is still plenty of hostility within ICANN to "closed" TLDs
through which a registry can allocate domains themselves without registrars
getting their mandatory pound of flesh. Sure, some domains need to be
available for sale by resellers, but why should that be the only -- or even
the dominant -- distribution model?

That's one example of how ICANN philosophy, backed by domain-industry
greed, erected barriers to innovation. So the innovators circumvented and
the public followed.

- Evan
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