Erwin Oliva’s letter
January 21, 2005I recently received a letter from Erwin Oliva of the Inquirer.
Hi Erwin,
Thanks for dropping by. Here are the answers to your questions:
1) Based on the change of IANA/ICANN policies on disputes, how are you going to handle the choice between being a registrar and registry?
Basically, we have no idea why Mr. Pena wants us to choose between being a Registrar or Registry. We’ve asked him several times in person & in our letters to him what the rationale for this was. What problem is he trying to fix? Does he think that by closing down the DotPH Registrar division, more companies will apply to be Registrars? If you look at our website, all it takes to be a DotPH Registrar is for someone to buy 20 domains! Today, DotPH has over 200 Registrars, and is actively encouraging more to apply . See June 10, 2004 post here.
Does he think that by doing this, the prices of PH domains will drop? We’ve tried to explain that domain prices are determined by market forces. In the Philippines, practically every ISP sells COM domains and PH Domains. Yet a survey taken in 2004 (See Part VIII, Pricing) shows that the retail price of COM and PH are roughly the same at $35/year. By preventing Dotph from being a Registrar, you reduce competition in the marketplace and this may actually cause PH domains to be more expensive than COM. And even if Mr. Pena were to order the Registry to drop wholesale prices to the level of COM, it’s clear that the retail price of PH will not change!
We’re totally in the dark, and what we’ve suggested is for Mr. Pena to first itemize what problems he sees in the way DotPH operates, in our service, in our policies, etc. Then we can talk about ways to solve this, and then draft a contract that binds us (and the government) to prevent these problems from recurring. We’ve asked for this so many times,
see
Nov 14, 2003
Feb 5, 2004
Mar 12, 2004
Mar 25, 2004
Mar 31, 2004
that I can only guess that Mr. Pena is concerned that he won’t be able to find any substantial problems in our operations?
If you recall, the very same people Mr. Pena is dealing with, who are now calling for redelegation, were asked in 2000 by then DTI Asst. Secretary Toby Monsod, to list and substantiate their complaints. By 2002, every single complaint filed wasdismissed by the DTI.
2) in case government pushes for redelegation if you’re not able to comply with its guidelines, what are you prepared to do?
Please take a look at RFC 1591, which states that ICANN will not step in unless there is proof that DotPH has “substantially misbehaved”. This is why I think it’s important for Mr. Pena to really study if there are any substantial (and substantiated) problems in our operation. It helps him seize control of the Registry (if that is really his objective); but more importantly, it allows us to start discussing ways to solve these problems which may not necessarily be as drastic and confrontational.
I’ve tried to explain to Mr. Pena that the Guidelines, as crafted are way too onerous for anyone to agree with. For example, the Guidelines give the CICT the right to impose arbitrary rules and regulations. And if we disagreed, we would have no choice but to face redelegation! I don’t see how any Registry can possibly agree to this. Who would invest time and money in a business that depends on the whims of the CICT? IMHO, that’s a formula that encourages corruption.
I’ve also tried to explain to Mr. Pena that Guidelines are riddled with errors. For example, a key provision (Article XII, section 2) is that the Administrator should “divest itself of either the operations of Registry or its Registar operations”. In reality, the PH Administrator has no equity in the Registry or Registrar operation. Never had, and never will! So theoretically, even if we wanted to comply with the Guidelines, we can’t!
The message here is that if Mr. Pena wanted to solve problems, he would have involved us in the making of the Guidelines. But we weren’t invited to the Advisory Board meetings. All the papers we painstakingly submitted during the public hearings went unanswered.
See March 31, 2004
Feb 5, 2004
It’s really unfortunate. As a result , Mr. Pena has approved a set of Guidelines that are not only erroneous, but - if implemented - will substantially weaken the PH Domain, rather than strengthen it.
Update: I’ve also just had a conversation today with Mr. Pena, where he absolutely refused to discuss amending the Guidelines and repeatedly threatened to redelegate. So I guess the die is cast….
Verisign CEO on SiteFinder
January 17, 2005Q: Site Finder — your product that referred people who mistyped a domain to a search engine that included advertising from which you could profit — that did generate a lot of consumer backlash.
A: Let me stop you there. If there was true consumer backlash, we would have taken it down in five minutes. We surveyed millions of consumers. Eighty- four percent of them thought the service was much better than what their experience had been without it, meaning that either you get an error page because you typed in the wrong thing, or you get a very similar service to ours, from Microsoft or AOL. So when people say there was a big consumer backlash, that’s really not quite true. There was an Internet technical community backlash to it because it wasn’t what they were used to. It really was 200 people stepping in to try to govern what 751 million people used. Quite frankly, we don’t think it was representative of what Internet (users) would have done. We’ve invested millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars in these services and we’d like to build new services on top of them that have some customer value. We believe Site Finder was one of those. I think we’re still in the early stages of governance on the Internet, and I don’t think ICANN has yet found a model that works well. In the three years since we started designing international domain names and the three years since we started designing a wait-list service so people could reserve names as other people give them up, two dozen companies have gotten into those businesses, and we’re still waiting to launch the service, because ICANN has one more hoop for us to jump through. So it’s a very odd system where we’re supposed to tell our competitors everything we’re going to do years before we get to launch a service. It’s not commercially reasonable.
The full interview is available here.
a VoIP Video phone. Wifi Videophones next?
January 14, 2005
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Motorola just announced the Ojo Broadband Videophone at the January CES.
It’s not Wifi, but it’s wireless (100 ft range). The screen is 5.6″ wide
and is full color. It’s designed to be marketed by ISPs or DSL/Cable
providers with their own SIP proxies. (eg - I don’t see a way for users to
fiddle with the SIP settings, so they can switch providers).
A $499 Mac!
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I’m very impressed. The Mac Mini comes with 40G HD and 256 MB DDR SDRAM, and a
Combo (cd-r/dvd-rom) drive! And it’s miniscule! You can use it to just
watch DVDs at home. Since it has a firewire Port, you can use it to
transfer video from your videocam (and edit using iMovie). And the price
is right! Best of all, I don’t have to pay the absurd P13T price for Win XP. We’re seriously considering buying these Macs once our Wintel
boxes expire. We may even use these as Unix servers (at DotPH), if some
of our Linux applications work fine on BSD. This is Apple’s cheapest
Mac to date, and they’re going for the mainstream. We may yet see Apple’s
3% market share jump into the low teens. Steve Jobs claims (in his
MacExpo Jan 2005 speech) that iPod now owns 65% of the mp3 player market.
That’s quite a surprise to me (as I don’t see too many iPods being sold
here), but it’s interesting that Apple may have lost the PC market, yet it
now dominates the mp3 player market.
Online Militancy and the Denial of Service Attack
January 10, 2005Today I received a letter from Wilson Chua, President of Bitstop,
complaining to Jojie Yap of PISO (and President of Pacific Internet)
complaining about NTC’s slow action on our complaint regarding PLDT’s
predatory DSL pricing.
I’ve taken this opportunity to illustrate how a “coalition of the willing”
can initiate a “denial of service attack” on Government to force
Government to mend its ways. In this day and age, there is a crying need
for the citizenry to be able to reform government without having to resort
to bloody, violent revolution, or to wait six years for a change in
administration.
