Between his business, Internet radio show and guest appearances, it’s difficult to figure out what exactly motivates GoDaddy’s CEO Bob Parsons.
It isn’t the continued stability of the Internet, for which his domain name company depends, that’s for sure. Faced with a choice of pumping up GoDaddy’s margins or ensuring the companies that operate the core infrastructure have the means to continually invest to keep it stable and secure, he votes for his margins everytime.
And it can’t be his customers or Internet users, as he sometimes claims. If it was, he wouldn’t have pocketed the $1.3 million windfall GoDaddy got when prices for .net names went down last year. GoDaddy didn’t pass on that financial windfall to his customers, he pocketed the cash. Heck, that’s almost enough to pay for a Super Bowl ad!...
Today, ICANN's Board of Directors approved a set of agreements settling a long time dispute between ICANN and VeriSign, the registry operator for the .COM registry, and cleared the way for business certainty for registrly operators in the process.
That is the underlying question at the fall ICANN meetings that 463 is attending in Vancouver. The Internet policy world has always been a geeky wild, wild west, but there are signs that the Internet infrastructure community – operators, users, businesses – are trying to get their house in order. And none too soon given the fact that the UN, ITU and some freedom-unfriendly countries (read Syria, Iran, Cuba) would like governments to control the Internet.
A big test for the Internet community is whether it can resolve long-standing differences. ICANN announced two months ago a lawsuit settlement with VeriSign, but it has yet to take final action to end the litigation. There are many special interests who justify their opposition using a myriad of arguments but most center on their fear they will lose the ability to dictate ICANN actions by controlling their budget and policy process.
Calmer heads prevailed at this week’s international meetings on control over the Internet. The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) meetings in Tunis are coming to an end after a compromise was reached about control over the Internet infrastructure. ICANN currently coordinates the technical foundation of the Internet, with the United States playing a mostly hands-off role as the legal backstop.
Some more “hands-on” countries (China and Syra, for example) were cheerleading an EU effort to insert governments into the role of overseeing the Internet. The stalemate was more about businesses vs. government control than US. vs. The World angle in the papers, but hey the media needs controversy and that’s a sexy if oversimplified story....
In less than two weeks, nations of the world will gather at the U.N.'s World Summit on the Information Society (known as WSIS) in Tunisia. The WSIS process started two years ago, and during most of that time UN and government reps insisted that this wasn’t about taking control over the Internet. Until three weeks ago, when the EU said it was.
Now the United States is pitted against the EU and UN. The media typically paints it as a “US vs. The World” stand-off, but that’s oversimplifying it. It’s much more a question of businesses vs. governments....
In a story in the Washington Times, John Zarocostas reports that that the United States will fight attempts to put the United Nations in charge of the Internet. Amen! The UN is a teriffic organization, but in charge of the net? Come on. The Internet has thrived to change the way we live and conduct business exactly because it has been able to develop without central control. We're all for wiring the world, especially remote places in Africa and South America, but the way the UN would do it is exactly the way to prevent that from happening.
VeriSign CEO, Stratton Sclavos dove deep with both San Francisco Chronicle and CNET editors recently in an outreach effort to underline how the company's intelligent infrastructure services bring together disparate elements like RFID, VOIP, Internet commerce, security and the .com and .net registries. Today's Chronicle article is here and the CNET Q&A here. In the Chronicle interview, Sclavos says this about ICANN...
"I think a strong ICANN, well run, would be a good thing. I think that
if you can create self-regulation, that is always the best model, versus
legislation or country-by-country mandates. But ICANN was created in a time
when the Internet was booming, domain names were growing fivefold a year,
there was just total chaos. And so the reasons for which it was created no
longer exist.
"At the same time, they have been, in our opinion, interfering with our
business, against what our contractual terms are, and so we're in a legal
dispute with them to get some clarity around what we can and can't do."
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Between his business, Internet radio show and guest appearances, it’s difficult to figure out what exactly motivates GoDaddy’s CEO Bob Parsons.
