Vittorio Bertola wrote:
Wendy Seltzer ha scritto:
[Third time's the charm? Apparently my earlier attempts to post this were eaten by a spam blocker.]
If ICANN't keep a contract, let the public enforce it
(Perhaps, to make the text more readable, we should put a brief introduction plus the resolution at the beginning, and move the rationale to an appendix, as Izumi did.)
Sounds like a good idea.
Resolved that: Recognizing that the public Internet users are intended beneficiaries of
its contracts
ICANN should strike the "no third-party beneficiary" language from its Registrar Accreditation Agreements and Registry Agreements;
ICANN should promptly adopt a schedule and provisions for escrowing of data from all registrars, as envisioned in RAA 3.6 and from registries.
Can I propose a couple more points? I think that there are some more general lessons to be learned: if ICANN doesn't raise the priority level of "registrant protection", we risk getting into similar problems again in the future. So I would add a couple of additional resolutions such as:
* ICANN should be more responsive to registrar misbehaviour or failure that affects a significant number of registrations, using its credibility, "moral suasion" and contractual opportunities to help their prompt resolution; it should also deploy appropriate instruments (complaint forms, news monitoring etc.) to proactively obtain early warning about the insurgency of such problems.
I'm not sure. I don't want ICANN to become a consumer protection agency, because I don't anticipate that it will do any better job at that than in any of its other mission-creep roles. I'd rather push on expanding opportunities for referral to outside enforcement, perhaps with some self-regulation to avoid that enforcement. --Wendy
* ICANN should foster the bottom-up development of best practices for registrars and domain name resellers, on matters such as information passed on to customers, domain name administration procedures, transfer and renewal policies, etc., to help the industry reach better and more predictable standards in the service offered to customers.
-- 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/