It is my opinion that transfer-away fees border on monopolistic practices by registrars. I think any registrar who imposes such fees should be boycotted by the community. However, the question is, 'should we research' the situation. Of course. aloha, RJ Glass A@L On 3/27/07, Wendy Seltzer <wendy@seltzer.com> wrote:
What's the best way to move this forward, at least to the question of whether it's something ALAC wants to commission?
Forever, we've been saying ALAC should do research. This seems like a fairly simple question to ask and answer on the data side, though we'd still have work to do interpreting and reaching policy conclusions from it.
--Wendhy
Izumi AIZU wrote:
I think it's good idea to organize this survey. If possible, could we also do some user survey on the same subject? Ideally, I like to make an online survey which costs minimum with some automatic tally feature.
The challenge may be how to avoid spam or non-serious responses, etc.
izumi
2007/3/8, Wendy Seltzer <wendy@seltzer.com>:
Thanks to Danny Younger for starting this conversation.
Danny has proposed that the ALAC initiate research on a specific, registrant-affecting question: What are the scope and magnitude of transfer-away fees among the various registrars? These fees, charged to domain-name registrants when they seek to leave one registrar for another, can lock registrants in to a registrar who no longer serves their needs (as has happened in droves with former Registerfly customers). High fees can also contravene the intent of the uniform transfers policy. We have seen little public information about these fees.
So, here is a focused research task: For each registrar, ask Is there a transfer-away fee for registrants to take their domain names to another registrar? If so, what is the fee? Is the transfer-away fee disclosed to the registrant at the time of registration? Where and how is such disclosure made? Is the fee subject to change?
After we decide whether these are the relevant questions, we should ask staff to contact all registrars for their responses, and/or review public information on the registrars' websites.
If you're interested in this research, please respond to this message with your thoughts.
--Wendy
-- Wendy Seltzer -- wendy@seltzer.org Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html http://www.chillingeffects.org/
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-- Wendy Seltzer -- wendy@seltzer.org phone: 718.780.7961 // fax: 718.780.0394 // cell: 914.374.0613 Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html http://www.chillingeffects.org/
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