The GAC’s recommendations raise complex issues of ICANN’s mission and governance and how they relate to the laws of the jurisdictions in which the registries operate. Without getting into the details of the specific recommendations, the expansion of ICANN’s role implicit in the GAC’s recommendations is inconsistent with ICANN’s policy of opening entry into the domain space. Opening entry into the domain name space is intended to bring the benefits of competition and greater innovation to the market for TLDs. A major benefit of a competitive market is that there is generally no need for regulation of product attributes, as the GAC is proposing. Indeed, regulation of such a market will be counterproductive to the interests of consumers.
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Thomas Lenard is Senior Fellow and President Emeritus at the Technology Policy Institute. Lenard is the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles on telecommunications, electricity, antitrust, privacy, e-commerce and other regulatory issues. His publications include Net Neutrality or Net Neutering: Should Broadband Internet Services Be Regulated?; The Digital Economy Fact Book; Privacy and the Commercial Use of Personal Information; Competition, Innovation and the Microsoft Monopoly: Antitrust in the Digital Marketplace; and Deregulating Electricity: The Federal Role.
Before joining the Technology Policy Institute, Lenard was acting president, senior vice president for research and senior fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation. He has served in senior economics positions at the Office of Management and Budget, the Federal Trade Commission and the Council on Wage and Price Stability, and was a member of the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis. He is a past president and chairman of the board of the National Economists Club.
Lenard is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and holds a PhD in economics from Brown University. He can be reached at [email protected]
