[At-Large] ALAC Draft Resolution on Domain Tasting

[Izumi AIZU]

Dear ALAC/RALO/ALS people,

At the last ALAC conference call, I volunteered to write some draft
resolution for ALAC on Domain Tasting (and Domain monetization).

With my limited knowledge, I rather hesitate, but put forward the following
as a very crude draft. I owe much part to John Levin's comment (on internal
list months ago), who unfortunately left ALAC recently. I hope John still
watch this open list and make further contribution, together with all
others.

I repeat this is very very crude, and I am aware that some porposals may not
be readily accepted by you guys, especially in the area of domain
monetization.

I still feel that the speculation is not for the interest of ordinary users,
perhaps OK with Domainers as new and innovative industry. For that, I really
like you to come up with clear and convincing ideas and solutions. This
draft is just a step stone for that.

Thanks,

izumi



*Draft Resolution on Domain Tasting
ICANN AtLarge Advisory Committee (ALAC)

V. 0.8
Mar 12 2007*
*

*
On behalf of the ordinary Internet users, AtLarge Advisory Committee (ALAC)
would like to propose the following actions to be taken by the ICANN
Community on Domain Tasting and Domain Monetization.

*To gNSO Council:*
Start a Policy Development Process on Domain Tasting. We believe that Domain
Tasting is an abuse of existing Five-day Add Grace Period which results
confusion for the ordinary Internet users and give unfair treatment to
peculiar speculators. We propose to abandon the five day "Add Grace period".


*To Registrars Constituency:*
Finalize and implement Registrars Code of Conduct that prohibits unfair
speculation and exploitation on Domain name registration including the use
of five day Add Grace period.

*To Registry Constituency:*
We request the registries to consider how to avoid user confusion and unfair
practices by abolishing the five day add grace period. Adding small fee,
such as 25 cents per Domain to those registrants who kept their names using
add grace period may be one solution, but we are not fully convinced.
*To ICANN Board:
*We request ICANN Board to seriously consider how to prohibit unfair
speculation, enhance consumer trust to Domain Name registration system, by
a) Initiating a third party study on the impact of Domain Tasting and Domain
Monetization/speculation to the ordinary Internet users.
b) Initiating review of Registry – Registrar Contract that will promote the
fair trade and restrict unfair speculation.

*Background and Rationale:*
Domain tasting uses the five day add grace period to register domains
without paying for them. We think they are unfair acts: somewhere between
larceny and extortion, because the registration cost is zero and the purpose
of these registrations is just to make money taking advantage of automated
bulk registration to exploit the domain names which are the public goods in
essence.

As many people have noted, it's exploiting a loophole that shouldn't be
there in the first place.  There was a great deal of debate both in the
ICANN community and on the ICANN board about the deletion grace period, but
none at all about add grace which was apparently tossed into the package by
an ICANN staffer without asking anyone. So says Karl Auerbach, who was on
the board at the time, and I haven't seen anything to the contrary from any
other board member.

As Bob Parsons wrote in his blog:
*Millions of good .COM domain names – on any given day over 3.5 million and
climbing — are unfairly made unavailable to small businesses and others who
would actually register and use them in ways for which the names were
intended. Many times businesses accidentally let their domain names expire.
When they go to renew them, they find they have been snapped up – and taken
away with a huge expensive hassle to follow – by an add/drop registrar. *
(http://www.bobparsons.com/adddropscheme.html)

The usual explanation of domain tasting says that the registrars register
millions of domains, watch the traffic, and then after 4.9 days they delete
the ones that don't seem likely to make back the US$6.00. Often they just
delete them all and then reregister what they can a few minutes later until
they find the ones which produce enough traffic that yields well above $6
cost.

The add grace period is just a mistake. The problem it purports to solve is
not and never was an important one. If you let an important domain expire,
you risk losing the entire investment made in that domain over many years.
But if one registers a domain by mistake, the most one risks is the ten or
twenty dollars you paid to register it.

*On Domain Monetization*
We note that there is a meaningful difference between domain tasting and
domain monetization. Monetization is a straightforward arbitrage between the
cost of domain registrations and the revenue from as much pay-per-click
traffic as the domain owner can get from people who visit web sites in the
domain. It's a fundamentally sleazy business, since the web sites have no
useful content and the way they get the traffic is basically by tricking
people, either via typos or recently expired domains.

We do not think it is appropriate in this case to make ICANN as a regulator
to watch and prohibit the Domain monetization practice. Instead, we like to
ask those commercial activities such as Google or Overture to stop paying
for clicks on pages with no content, thereby dealing with a problem that is
not limited to typo and expired domains. We've seen click arbitrage, people
buying Google ads to drive traffic to pages that are simply other Google
ads. This kind of self-generating traffic for pay-per-click advertising is
confusing and unnecessary for ordinary Internet users and , in the long run,
not healthy for the development of Internet as a whole.

END
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