IMHO, ALAC should demand that user protection is guaranteed against misbehaviour by operators not under contract with ICANN.
Amen. In some other fora I was raising that point, I know that in the current state of affairs will be difficult to find what can be done, but it is an issue that affects the end user, then those who claim to represent them can not stay in mute and must speak up, if not their representativeness will be under big scrutiny. I spent many years explaining to a lot of people that the DNS is a shared resource, which includes the ccTLDs. ccTLDs are not for internal use, yes they play with a different set of rules in regards to how the name is managed, what policies apply, and who/how can get names in that space, but they also serve the entire Internet community, if .XY goes down it not only affects people in XY, it affects the rest of the Internet community, if .XY policies facilitate for spammers, fraudsters, criminals to obtain names, that affects everybody. The fuss is not about if .CO can exploit their goldmine, is how that gold is being promoted and sold by some registrars that are misleading the end user to register a name claiming that this is the new dotCOM or that if you have a dotCOM name you MUST have dotCO too to protect your brand, yada, yada. Funny thing is that the registrar I was making reference to in a previous email didn't get his name.co and now is for sale at SEDO :-), as probably many of the new .co names recently registered, have an extra $500 ? you can get oprahwinfrey.co. ICANN may not be able to do something specific without a contract, but it can certainly as a community set the tone and provide guidelines where misbehavior gets exposed for the rest of the community. My .02 Jorge