The questions you're asking are interesting, but they're not what I was talking about. We all know that ICANN acts like the domain speculators' trade association; I said as much to Brian Krebs last week. I think we both agree that it would make sense to split off PTI to do the 501(c)(3) work and leave ICANN as a trade association, although there's some knotty problems including who pays for it (PTI's largest customer is the IETF who have never paid anything) and who if anyone gets to decide if there are yet more gTLDs.

My point was that even if Verisign is a de facto monopoly, so what? It's hard to see who's being damaged other than domain speculators, and there's no plausible remedy that wouldn't make things worse.

So, we have another common point of agreement, e.g. that ICANN is acting as a trade association. However, we seem to disagree on which trade members it is serving. I do not view ICANN as serving the domain name speculator community, but instead its contracting parties.

In order to free yourself from the defeatist attitude. Let's begin by defining a monopoly, and for this I will use Black's Legal Dictionary which provides the following definition: "A privilege or peculiar advantage vested in one or more companies, consisting in the exclusive right (or power) to carry on a particular business or trade." Under this definition ICANN has a monopoly over the IANA functions and Verisign has a monopoly over the .COM registry database. Hopefully, we can agree on this point/fact.

Now, in the current .COM agreement VRSN under 7.3 gets to raise prices 7% in the final 4 years of the current 6 year registry agreement no questions asked. However, if you look at the agreement from 2012, you will see that the ability for VRSN to raise .COM pricing was not unfettered. There were specific limitations on when it could raise prices. Specifically,"Registry Operator shall be entitled to increase the Maximum Price during the term of the Agreement due to the imposition of any new Consensus Policy or documented extraordinary expense resulting from an attack or threat of attack on the Security or Stability of the DNS."

Now what could have possible caused this difference in contractual terms, was it ICANN's General Counsel Mr Jeffrey holding VRSN's feet to the fire. Highly unlikely. Let's look at some old ICANN correspondence from NTIA and the US Department of Justice to perhaps get a better insight as to the dynamics at this time.

On page 4 of 11 of this PDF, Ms. Meredith Baker states the following: "[c]contrary to ICANN's apparent assumption, competition from existing TLDs - or from new gTLDs created pursuant to the RFP - is not likely to prevent the exercise of market power by new or existing TLDs, especially the .COM registry operated by VeriSign."

Ms. Baker continued stating "there will continue to be a need for Setion 7.3 of the .com registry agreement to replace the discipline that market competition does not provide in this setting."

This is why my original questions remain relevant to our discussion. Who benefits most from ICANN's failure to undertake comprehensive periodic economic studies empowered to it under most registry agreements?

If you have not figured out the answer to that question yet, perhaps the following hint might help. In 1999 all ICANN registry agreements had a provision to require all registry operators to submit a proposal to continue the operation of their gTLD. Verisign was the first gTLD Registry Operator to get a presumptive right of renewal in the 2001 Registry Agreement with ICANN (see Paragraph 25), although they still had to submit a proposal and jump through some hoops. However, in 2006 Registry Agreement Verisign entered into the current default Registry Agreement language which states "this Agreement shall be renewed upon the expiration of the term" unless the Registry Operator is in material breach and fails to correct it.

See John, the group that has received the most significant economic benefit from ICANN has been Verisign and the gTLD Registry Operators. Instead of having to resubmit bids to renew their registry agreement with ICANN periodically, ICANN handed them registry agreements in perpetuity. If ICANN were truly a trade association for the domainer community as you stated, the Registry Operators would not have all of the power they currently possess.

To be clear I do not object to a TLD operator raising prices because of inflation or in connection with enhanced services, e.g. registrant verification, enhanced abuse monitoring, trusted notifier programs for CSAM and fake online pharmacies, etc. In fact, one needs to look no further than the great work that DENIC is doing as one of the world's largest TLDs to comply with the European NIS 2.0 requirements. However, when a registry operator consistently raises prices without implementing best in class safeguards to minimize abuse within its TLDs then I have a problem. In the gTLD space, PIR has been doing great work in the area of DNS abuse mitigation and has not raised their prices in years.

Why do I remain optimistic? I hope that Gail Slater, upon confirmation as the new head of the DOJ's anti-trust division, will review the documentation from 2008 to see if there has been a material change in the market forces involving .COM. I would then like the DOJ to coordinate with the FTC to see how VRSN's .COM best practices measure up against commercially available solutions in the marketplace. With this information, the DOJ would be able to make a fact-based determination of whether .COM registrants and Internet users have been harmed by how Verisign has allocated the excessive proceeds associated with these fee increases.

Hi, Mike. You're evidently more interested in making speeches than reading and responding to what I said, so I'd suggest writing up the speech and send it in as an article.

One question: if you think that regulating VRSN's prices is a remedy, how does that work? I'm not aware of DoJ or FTC ever doing that and I don't know what authority they'd have. My preferred remedy is to take .COM away from them and shut it down. That'll show them.

John, respectfully you have been the one that has been non-responsive to my questions while I have merely attempted to engage in fact-based discussion on an important topic.

So allow me to answer the specific question you posed in your last response. I believe national competition authorities such as the Department of Justice or DG COMP are a potential mechanism by which Verisign's conduct in the domain name market can be addressed. While the DOJ under US law does not have the authority to regulate pricing it does have the authority under the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up companies.

Therefore, if the investigation that I called for in my previous response was to lead to a determination that Verisign was abusing its market position in connection with the operation of the .COM registry, I believe suitable remedies under the Sherman Antitrust Act would be the divestiture of the .NET and the .WEB gTLDs from Verisign. I believe this would be an impetus to enhance free market competition in the domain name industry. In fact, this would be highly analogous to what Verisign had to do back in 2001, when it had to divest .ORG and competitively rebid .NET.

Regarding your question about previous actions by the DOJ or FTC this requires a little backstory and history lesson. The USG has historically delegated NTIA as the point on all things ICANN related. NTIA in the past has coordinated regularly calls with multiple US agencies to discuss ICANN and DNS related matters. Not surprisingly, NTIA has relied upon the DOJ closely over the years. For example in 2006, when Verisign was given the much more friendly presumptive right of renewal terms, NTIA released this fact sheet, see https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/icanncom_fact_113006.pdf

In this fact sheet you will see the following statement: "During the course of its review, the Department of Commerce sought the advice of the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division on competition issues raised by the new .com Registry Agreement. The Department also consulted with the federal agencies with equities in Internet security and stability."

Ms Baker's communication to the ICANN Board Chair in 2008 (cited above) includes a letter from the Deborah A. Garza from DOJ addressed to Ms. Baker DOC/NTIA. (My apologies for attributing the text of Ms. Garza to Ms. Baker in my previous post.) In this letter, Ms. Garza acknowledges that the Department of Commerce's "request of advice." The full quote from this letter which I previously cited reads "there will continue to be a need for Section 7.3 of the .com registry agreement to replace the discipline that market competition does not provide in this setting, as well as continued DOC oversight of the ,com registry under the Cooperative Agreement, which precludes VeriSign from amending or renewing the ,com agreement without DOC approval."

This safety valve provided the DOC the ability to leverage DOJ expertise in the area of anti-trust when reviewing each .com contract under the old cooperative agreement, which they did repeatedly. This included the period of time when VeriSign did not raise its registry prices. As noted in the recent NTIA statement, NTIA lost this important safeguard during the previous Trump administration, see https://domainnamewire.com/2018/11/01/breaking-u-s-gov-grants-verisign-com-price-hikes/ and https://domainnamewire.com/2024/12/01/ntia-issues-bizarre-statement-about-com-pricing/

It is my opinion Verisign's attorneys bamboozled the previous Trump administration into adding the "mutual agreement" clause to the Cooperative Agreement. For anyone watching American politics, the Trump 2.0 administration appears to be about retribution and remaking the US government. Unlike in 2018 when DOC/NTIA had the wool pulled over their eyes by Verisign, this time the incoming Trump administration seems to have a clear game plan in place. I would recommend for everyone to read Tony Rutkowski's CircleID article on Project 2025: The Internet and Cybersecurity.

You can have the last word, John. Not how I envisioned spending my Thursday afternoon but now it is time to watch Thursday Night Football. Go Packers !!!