Referee's Report

"The Aebischer-Miner paper shows how to use certain tools of higher-dimensional quasiconformal analysis to perform local deformations of classical Schottky groups. This is nice, and I am glad it is written up, but there is a major philosophical problem with the paper which prevents me from recommending it for publication at present.

What the authors take as their notion of a Schottky group is what usually gets called a classical Schottky group. In the H3 / S2 case, there are open sets in Schottky space disjoint from the locus of classical Schottky groups...Thus, even in the simplest case their techniques necessarily break down...

Maybe the issue disappears in higher dimension or in the complex case. I don't know. But this must be addressed before the main theorems of the paper can be accepted."