[arin-ppml] Analogies

[William Herrin]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 1:14 PM, John Curran <jcurran at arin.net> wrote:
> On Apr 29, 2011, at 1:06 PM, William Herrin wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 12:31 PM, John Curran <jcurran at arin.net> wrote:
>>> Could you explain?  When that happened, I don't recall there
>>> being any competitive registries.
>>
>> Hi John,
>> IIRC, the big (or at least loud) one was AlterNIC. There's a list here:
>
> But that did not provide an option for someone with an existing domain
> name in an established TLD, correct?

Hi John,

It wasn't intended to and it wasn't needed to. What it did was allow
an alternate supply of a functionally identical product to compete.
The competition to the roots failed in part because ICANN reacted to
the threat by bringing about significant competition within its own
TLD system. And domains aren't $50/year any more, they're $10 with
virtually no qualifying criteria save that you in fact pay the $10.

ARIN and the RIRs took a radically different path. Instead of
competing processes, we built cooperative consensus-driven processes.
One early price was that the legacy registrants had to be drawn in to
that consensus by, essentially, promising not to mess with them.

I frankly don't know which method I'd label "superior" but I do know
that it is very very hard to draw an inference between how the DNS
situation played out and how IP addressing could be modeled that
stands up to even mild scrutiny. The closest I was able to come was
embodied in prop 103.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004