Hi Roberto, On 2 August 2010 07:43, Roberto Gaetano <roberto@icann.org> wrote: IMHO, ALAC should demand that user protection is guaranteed against
misbehaviour by operators not under contract with ICANN.
During the recent discussions on amendments to the RAA, there was talk about registrant rights and responsibilities. I became involved in this because I thought that ICANN was the right forum in which to establish a statement of rights that would guide ICANN -- and ultimately its contracted parties -- in its dealing with registrants and the public. As it turned out, the RAA modification discussion -- which was dominated by contracted parties -- defined its scope to be limited to defining what rights already exist (ie, can be extracted from the wording of the RAA). Thus, it was a task of providing documentation based on existing policy rather that effecting policy to entrench registrant rights. I kept pushing for a "bill of rights" type document, a high-level statement of what rights *should* be regardless of what was in the legal wording. The contracted parties ridiculed this effort, in one meeting challenging me to come up with an idea of what such a document would look like. I hastily came up with a number of items that I thought to be core principles adopted by ICANN. That is, *Registrants should have the rights to:* * 1. have accurate, current and complete contact and locative information regarding their registrar 2. be the sole entity capable of asserting and changing ownership information for their domain 3. have ample opportunity to renew their existing domain(s) at the same rates as new domains 4. protect their trade name against unauthorised use 5. refuse the transfer of their personal information to unauthorised bodies 6. expect ICANN to enforce its agreements with registrars* This became known within the RAA discussion (insultingly, IMO) as the "aspirational charter". While I acknowledged that the list above was hastily done and needed significant additional review (and perhaps complete re-write), the group refused to discuss it further (at least one participant called the effort "silly and a waste of time<http://forum.icann.org/lists/raa-improvements2010/msg00000.html>") and decided it was At-Large's sole responsibility to move the idea forward any further. Nonetheless, the aspirational charter became part of the report on the RAA group's activity<http://brussels38.icann.org/meetings/brussels2010/presentation-gnso-raa-improvements-20jun10-en.pdf>at the Brussels meeting, and (IMO) exists as a starting point from which ALAC may be able to start asserting that ICANN's activity should be driven by the needs of the public and domain buyers, not the needs of suppliers. Maybe it was silly. It was not intended as a waste of anyone's time, nor was it intended to be anything beyond an idea of the *type* of statement that could ultimately guide ICANN policy. As a relative newcomer perhaps that was not the right forum to start such an initiative; but if not, then ehwre? At least it was an attempt to provide a way for ALAC to bring the needs and rights of "the bottom of the pyramid" to the forefront if ICANN policy. Done as a high-level document, it can be something that ICANN may not be able to directly enforce on every ccTLD registry. but it could be a set of principles that the GAC could endorse and thus filter its way into national TLD policies. Arguably, if these rights were sufficiently high level and universal, they would apply to *any* TLD (and thus dissection of the "purpose" of any particular TLD, would be irrelevant for this context). - Evan