[registrars] Nominations for Chair.

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine]

Morning all,

At the end of last month Jay Westerdal observed that he'd worked with both
Jordyn and Bhavin but as he coulnd't vote for both, he asked the canidates
to write a note and discuss some issues -- what they would change in the
constituency, and why?

\begin{my_two_bits}
We're all fairly reactive as retailers to what our wholesalers do, generally
to our surpise and almost as generally not "equally" affecting our P&L lines.

Independent of our composition, which could change radically if all the new
accreditations decide that they want to get involved in the RC, and ICANN's
budget crisis, which everyone has a view on, I intend to nag member companies
to act rather than simply react. The EPP implementation activity is going to
take time, and if Registries dominate, then our common interest that the cost
of variation, unique to Registrars, may not be addressed.

The same observation applies to what the IPR constituency does on the whois
issue.  They have been more in charge of this policy area, and our cost to
provide, or not provide, whois service than we have been.

Their "trademark" buys are just pass-throughs to us, no more valuable than
non-IPR buys, and to the Registries they are a large source of guaranteed
income (the IPC has always opposed the creation of more registries), and the
Registries don't care if the IPC whois policy of personal data being public
even when national law is to the contrary, as in the EU, Canada, Japan and
elsewhere, conflicts wildly with our general case customer -- the privacy-
seeking, spam-avoiding buyer.

Finally, We're all fairly reactive to what the market regulator does. ICANN
ignores registrars pretty much, and that isn't going to change any time soon.

I have pet projects -- getting the value of domain names to spammers to
decline, getting the nameserver operators to improve (anyone notice that
when both cables to Haiti were cut last week, every authoritative NS for
an entire ccTLD, and every name in the .ht zone vanished?), and I'm busy
transfering NSI wholesale accounts for ISP customers (who probably don't
want to get caught up in the NSI-private game of musical chairs with
SnapNames anyway), so the XFR issue concerns me.

That said, I don't view the Chair as being a "advocacy" position. I do that
anyway. I don't view the Chair as being a "consensus" thing either. Some
differences can't be reconcilled and have to be voted stright up or down.

I appreciate the nomination from Werner Staub and Marcus Faure of CORE, and
the second from Tim Ruiz (GoDaddy).
\end{my_two_bits}

Eric