To help categorize the issues, I'll use the code letters V and I for Verisign and ICANN, $ for financial issues, and ! for oversight and adminsitrative issues so a V$ would be about Verisign money.

• The $6 registry fee (V$)

The agreement sets the registry fee at $6 plus 7% per year, even though there are credible bids to run it for about half that price. The 7% escalator is far above the likely inflation rate, and services that depend on computers should get cheaper, not more expensive.

• Automatic renewals (V$, V!)

The registry agreement is self-renewing unless there's a material breach. While this is consistent with previous contracts, the whole point of the ICANN lawsuit was to establish that there had indeed been material breaches that would disqualify VRSN from automatic renewals.

• The 75 cent ICANN fee (I$)

The agreement triples ICANN's per-domain fee paid by registrants to a fixed 75 cents, which they can use for whatever they want. This triples ICANN's revenue.

• The ICANN fee isn't subject to registrar approval (I!)

The agreement removes the current requirement of the registrars to approve the registry fee and hence limit ICANN's budget. ICANN now has a large budget with no outside oversight,

• VRSN $200M R&D commitment disappears (V$)

The current 2001 agreement requires that VRSN spend $200M on infrastructure R&D by 2010, with a substantial portion by 2007. The new agreement contains no such language.

• VRSN owns the traffic data (V!)

The agreement allows VRSN to collect traffic data and do whatever they want with it include selling it, so long as they don't disclose registrant or end-user information. (It's not clear whether a domain name itself is considered registrant information.) The traffic data shows inquiries about both existing and non-existent domains and is an extremely valuable source of information. Karl Auerbach has commented that they could monitor in real time the hits on names in URLs in television ads. People have commented that Google would likely run the registry for free if they could mine the traffic data.

• VRSN's past sins are all forgiven (V!)

The ICANN lawsuit alleged serious misbehavior on Verisign's part. In the skirmishes to date, ICANN had done pretty well, getting VRSN's antitrust claims dismissed, and had a strong case that VRSN was in material breach which would have voided the .COM and .NET agreements and allowed them to be relet to someone else, most likely at a much lower price. The settlement drops all charges against VRSN.

• The Snapnames suit continues (V!)