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

[Antony Van Couvering]

You would think that a group representing internet users would concentrate on what just about all users of anything concentrate on, which is price.  And yet apart from Karl's contributions, it is not an issue that raises its head here at ALAC very much at all.  

Instead, complaints are about how much money registrars and registries make, which isn’t a user concern at all unless it affects pricing. In fact, unbelievably, there are complaints that domain names are too cheap, because people with ideas that are unsavory might take advantage. I have never in my life before seen a group that is supposed to care about the average user/consumer complain that prices are too high. 

P.S. Karl, ICANN’s scope also includes introducing and maintaining choice and competition in the marketplace. It’s a squishy remit, obviously, but it is there. 

> On Sep 16, 2023, at 12:25 PM, Karl Auerbach via At-Large <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote:
> 
> 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--
> 
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