The 100 year domain: legal or not?

I received news that NSI is now offer­ing a 100 years domain name reg­is­tra­tion. It’s an inter­est­ing con­cept but with a few flaws.

A cen­tury is a long time

Con­sid­er­ing that the com­mer­cial Inter­net is barely a decade old and that the Inter­net itself is less than half a cen­tury old, to assume that things won’t change in the next cen­tury may be an ill fated con­ceit. What hap­pens if the name spaces change? What if domain names are no longer used in the future? Will NSI refund the money for all those unused years? Appar­ently not.

Net­work Solu­tions viability

The assump­tion here is that NSI will still exist in a cen­tury. Oth­er­wise, what hap­pens if the com­pany dis­bands, dis­ap­pears, merges with some­one else? Will the terms of the con­tract expire upon such an event? What guar­an­tees is NSI mak­ing that I’ll still be able to hang on to my domain under those con­di­tions? Accord­ing to their ser­vice agree­ment,

You acknowl­edge and agree that our abil­ity to pro­vide the 100-Year Domain Ser­vice is depen­dent upon, among other things, the con­tin­ued reg­is­tra­tion of the rel­e­vant domain name, and that any ter­mi­na­tion of that reg­is­tra­tion (for what­ever rea­son) will result in the ter­mi­na­tion of the 100-Year Domain Ser­vice for that registration.

So if net­work solu­tions loses the right to domain name reg­is­tra­tions or gets out of that busi­ness, you are left hold­ing noth­ing. Basi­cally, they pro­vide a ser­vice with no guar­an­tees what­so­ever. That’s not good.

Can they do that?

The other impor­tant thing is that NSI is sell­ing some­thing they don’t actu­ally own. They are not guar­an­teed accred­i­ta­tion for the next cen­tury. That’s a right only ICANN cur­rently enjoys.

NSI vio­lates agree­ment with ICANN

Accord­ing to their lit­er­a­ture, the ser­vice is non-transferable:

It is impor­tant to note that your pre-paid 100 Year Domain Ser­vice is pro­vided exclu­sively by Net­work Solu­tions for you, and will ter­mi­nate upon any trans­fer of your domain name to another reg­is­trar, with no refunds.

Inter­est­ing in the sense that this seems absolutely arbi­trary and if it is, then NSI is in vio­la­tion of the rules set forth by ICANN on domain trans­fer. I’m not a lawyer but it seems to me that there is some­thing fishy here.

Pric­ing

Also accord­ing to their mar­ket­ing,

Lock in your domain reg­is­tra­tion for our low­est price avail­able — just $9.99 a year. This is a sav­ings of over 70% com­pared to pay­ing annually.

What I don’t see there is a guar­an­tee of reim­burse­ment if they lower their price fur­ther. And com­pared to other reg­is­trars, the price they are offer­ing is still not the most competitive.

So why, exactly, would any­one con­sider this a good offer?