[At-Large] DomainIncite : Is this why WhatsApp hates some TLDs but not others?

[Karl Auerbach]

On 9/15/23 9:53 PM, bzs at theworld.com wrote:
> How about selling tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of
> machine-generated domains to spammers/phishers for a steeply discounted
> price?
>
I would not jump to agree that dealing with this is withing ICANN's 
scope - which is the matter of keeping the top two layers of the primary 
DNS system reliably, promptly, and accurately turning domain name 
queries into domain name responses.  (A nod may be made in the direction 
of also including oversight of the addition and removal of TLDs.)

If generating domain names and selling them for what they actually cost 
(mere pennies rather than the ICANN system's dollars) is, in itself, 
something ill that ICANN should regulate against?

There are laws, passed by real legislatures, against fraud, 
misrepresentation, and conspiracies to do ill.  Those things are the 
acts to be complained of, not the registration of lots of names that 
someone conjectures might be used in ill ways.  It is no more ICANN's 
role to enforce laws about fraud than it is for ICANN to enforce laws 
about murder.

There is a vast distance between ICANN punishing a registrar or registry 
for, one one hand, merely selling lots of names for cheap and, on the 
other hand, a conspiracy, an agreement, between spammers and that 
registrar and registry.  ICANN ought to leave the determination of such 
conspiracies to the legal systems of the world.  Yes, there is a 
problem, not just ICANN's problem, of different jurisdictions arriving 
at contradictory results.  But that is a problem much broader than ICANN.

Automobiles are used in many crimes.  Would that justify the US Society 
of Automotive Engineers (a standards body) regulate Ford, GM, Honda, 
Toyota (etc) for producing and selling low cost cars?

Is ICANN to be the policeman - and perhaps the Puritan minister - of the 
Internet?

ICANN is a textbook case of mission creep (actually in ICANN's case it 
is mission gallop) and regulatory capture.  Do we want to encourage and 
applaud this?

To me, the most interesting aspect of the practice of which you complain 
is that it demonstrates the utter fallacy of the ICANN imposed business 
model, a model that multiples un-audited costs by tens of thousands of 
percent so that internet users pay prices for domain names that are 
thousands of times higher than the actual cost of providing that 
service.   ICANN is a money pump that sucks $$billions out of the 
pockets of internet users - and yet it gives those users no real voice 
or vote.  That is the real scandal of which we ought to be complaining.

          --karl--