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RD: It will appear before this interview, I'm sure. The prices haven't been set yet either. We were working on it, and will announce it within the next few weeks. I can tell you in advance that for the overwhelming number of stones we grade and for the overwhelming number of clients, there will be a price reduction. For the larger stones there might be a slight increase. I don't think it'll be material in either case. But our former pricing structure, the membership structure, where invited people with annual fees were given reduced rates, that's history.

MJ: It's been written that Rapaport has canceled his contract with GIA. True?

RD: There was no contract with Rap. There was a business relationship. It was never in the form of a contract.

MJ: Do you agree that Rapaport had been granted, as Chaim Even-Zohar has written, "what amounted to a monopoly" with that relationship? If so, why was such a monopoly granted?

RD: We've been under constraint from our attorneys to speak on many of these matters, but I'm free to speak on this. I don't agree that this is a monopoly, I think that is a stretch. Historically, we had a number of drop-off windows—usually linked to shipping services—where locals could drop off stones that were then passed to New York or Carlsbad. Rap asked to become one of those windows in Israel, and he spread the GIA gospel in Israel quite well, and made a lot of dealers and cutters aware of what we had to offer. So he earned the business, to a large extent, by hard work, and to a lesser degree, by default, and as time went on, there was an impression that he was the only one who could get stones to us. But it's all perception. But, again, perception isn't something to ignore.

So, as we've ended the membership structure, we're opening windows everywhere, and hoping to open in places where we have no entities—in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, anyplace capable of gathering smaller dealers to consolidate pickups and shipping, for financial reasons. Rapaport is invited to continue as well. Because the pricing structure has changed, he will have to decide whether margins exist for him to continue, but that's his business. The two big misunderstandings are that we granted him an exclusive and that he's out. Neither are true.

MJ: What is GIA doing to reassure retailers and consumers that they can trust GIA reports?