[At-Large] Fwd: [APAC-Discuss] ALAC Draft Resolution on Domain Tasting
Izumi AIZU
iza at anr.org
Mon Mar 26 15:07:28 EDT 2007
I have received the following comments on Domain Tasting from
ISOC-AU, one of AP ALSes. I think they are great comments
for our reference.
izumi
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: cheryl at hovtek.com.au <cheryl at hovtek.com.au>
Date: 2007/03/26 14:31
Subject: Re: [APAC-Discuss] ALAC Draft Resolution on Domain Tasting
To: iza at anr.org
Hello Izumi, I trust this email (later than I'd planned I'm afraid)
finds you in Lisbon and in good health...
I did manage to elicit some responses from my outreach efforts
regarding your draft... Realising that our small contribution will be
only part of what you receive rather than edit the text per se I
include below the following comments, points and sentiments from those
organisations / people who did respond... by COB Friday.
Firstly, we must recognise that our experience here in .au is very
different from the gTLD world? here we have considerable public
interest and individual user input into our Domain Name system and
policy development and we also (in many ways *because* of this input)
have strong rules such as our eligibility criteria for all of our Open
2ld?s? see http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2005-02/
These rules go a long way towards giving our Domain Name users and
general public interest of the Internet a great deal of security and
confidence in names in the .au space? so even our consumer advocacy
groups such as CTN see www.ctn.org.au have had little direct
experiences of the types of frustrations that those only accessing the
open slather gTLD?s and may therefore be at some variance with those
public interest and consumer protection driven views?
Further in October 2005
http://www.auda.org.au/news-archive/auda-14102005/ & March 2006
http://www.auda.org.au/pdf/auda-domainmon-public.pdf auDA undertook
a public consultation process regarding Domain Monetisation and this
resulted in the publication of our auDA Policy Clarification of Close
and Substantial Connection Rule - Domain Monetisation (2006-03) on 20
July 2006.
A full list9ing of the public submissions received can be found at
http://www.auda.org.au/reviews/monetisation-2006/ and I specifically
stated in my distribution of your draft document that I would be
pointing these references out to you for use by the ALAC, and that
therefore no reiteration of those specific points needed to be made by
the respondents.
In general, support, was received for the intent of the text you
provided as Draft resolutions to the various councils on Domain
Tasting but not for the text titled ?On Domain Monitization?
Based upon this and on the background information provided previously
in this report, the following important points were made by our
respondents.
-That the ALAC is to be encouraged to express their request in terms
relating specifically to ICANN's mission and core values. e.g. part
of ICANN's
mission is to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's
unique identifier systems, and one of its core values is preserving and
enhancing the operational stability, reliability, security, and global
interoperability of the Internet.
-Any issues report that is produced through the ICANN policy development
process, will need to answer whether the issue is within ICANN's mission
and core values - rather than whether the issue is indeed something of
importance to end users. SO rewording of the draft should consider
this point to maxamise the likelyhood of a successful outcome.
-ICANN is not explicitly a consumer protection body. If it is purely a
consumer protection issue - then the first point of contact could well
be a registrar code of conduct, or perhaps alerting the relevant
consumer protection bodies in each country - e.g Australian Competition
and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in Australia, or the Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) in the USA to investigate.
An example of such a code of conduct, as it operates in Australia, can
be found at http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2004-04/ and the
committee process by which this was developed can be followed in
documents linked from the following page
http://www.auda.org.au/cop/cop-index/ and a full list of auDA Panels
and committee activities past and present can be found at
http://www.auda.org.au/panels/panels-index/
I've attached this text as a word doc and a .PDF so the links will be
live for you to use with the ALAC should you see fit.
Kindest regards,
Cheryl Langdon-Orr
(CLO)
Quoting Izumi AIZU <iza at anr.org>:
> 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
--
>> Izumi Aizu <<
Institute for HyperNetwork Society
Kumon Center, Tama University
* * * * *
<< Writing the Future of the History >>
www.anr.org
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