Last Updated on Wednesday, 23 September 2009 10:38
Today we will be Live Blogging the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy - Hearing on: The Expansion of Top Level Domains and its Effects on Competition
11:15 - Finally got it working. Will post updates shortly.
11:25 - Commitee member is asking if ICANN can do their job essentially? A very wide question with the answer with Doug Brent talking about how ICANN secures the root zone and how China needs its own ICANN appoved extension.
11:30 - How will this proposal assist with securing the Internet and Intellectual Properties?
response: Things are not as secure as they should be. This proposal is moving forward without considerations.
11:32 - What enforcement methods will ICANN have to keep gTLDs from violating their own rules?
Brent: Make it easy for IPs to challenge names. There's room to allow this to work better than it does.
DelBianco: If you have the right rules, maybe. Because enforcement is what counts. Right now we don't have any enforcement. Rules become obsolete the minute they are created.
Legislators have 5 days to submit new material. After that the committee will provide its recommendations.
Too bad I missed most of this due to the very poor method of streaming used by the US Subcommittee. It actually took raw file editting to get at the stream. We'll do better next time.
I've taken the time to post my comments related to the expiration process for domains at ICANN. I hope you will all join in and comment about how expiring domains are handled.
http://forum.icann.org/lists/pednr-wg-questions/msg00002.html
Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery
- To: pednr-wg-questions@xxxxxxxxx
- Subject: Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery
- From: ed@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:13:33 -0600
ICANN adopted statues specifically directed at "Domain Name Warehousing (4.1)", which don't appear to have ever been levied against any registrar.
"...at the end of the Redemption Grace Period is the domain name permanently removed from the registry database and made a part of the pool of available names." There appears to be no mention of the full expiration process, especially prior to the Grace Period.
This should be solidified, strictly enforced, and made comparable to any normal transaction involving property ownership. Registrars are merely transacting facilities for the registration of a domain name. They do not act as lessors, banks, or rental agencies in any manner. If a domain is really the property of the registrar, then registration agreements should reflect that. Presuming that they are merely a facilitator of a transaction, they should be as relative to the exchange as a real estate agent is to a home rental - it is never the broker's property. In the event of default, the tenant is moved out and the owner can call the broker to relist the property.
Confusion here lies in ownership. In theory all names are owned by ICANN, and by proxy the public at large. The vast portion of the fee in registration goes to the ICANN body. So there should be no ownership by registrars, no right to hold and no right to scuttle names away under aliases and false names.
Registrars should consistently allow names to be available to the general public. Whether this is a pre-release service with regulated fees or a public auction with formalized requirements for sale should not be the point of debate. What is critical is that registrars don't suddenly take on the responsibility for names which they never owned.
More importantly, any person who has lost a domain due to expiration and finds that domain now the property of a registrar or one of its aliases instead of a real, public entity should have the right to reclaim these names in a clear and concise ICANN policy.
Ed Muller - NameMon.com
