On Nov 27, 2007 1:04 AM, Alan Greenberg < alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca> wrote:

Earlier this year, the ALAC requested that ICANN develop an Issues
Report on Domain Tasting. Although the ICANN Bylaws allow an Advisory
Committee to request such reports, this was the first (and so far
only) time that a committee had actually done so.

The Issues report
(http://gnso.icann.org/issues/domain-tasting/gnso-domain-tasting-report-14jun07.pdf)
was issued in June and sent to the GNSO for further action. The
ALAC's request for the Issues Report is at the end of the report. The
GNSO charted an ad hoc group to further investigate and propose Terms
of Reference for a possible Policy Development Process (PDP). That
group's report can be found at
http://www.gnso.icann.org/drafts/gnso-domain-tasting-adhoc-outcomes-report-final.pdf .

At the LA ICANN meeting, the GNSO decided that domain tasting merited
further action, and voted to initiate a PDP. Constituency input has
been solicited and is due by December 5th. Although not a GNSO
constituency, input from the ALAC has been requested as well (a
first, I believe).

The statements will be combined by ICANN staff, and the result will
go back to the GNSO. To the extent that more work may need to be done
at that time, working groups will likely be formed.

The ALAC meeting on Nov. 20th accepted that we should contribute a
statement to the process, but that it did not need to be exhaustive
(for reasons of both time and that our actions had initiated the activity).

I propose the following statement. Comments and suggestions welcome.

=======================

ALAC "Constituency" statement regarding the PDP on Domain Tasting

The ALAC is pleased to have been asked to submit a statement
regarding the newly launched GNSO Policy Development Process (PDP) on
Domain Tasting.

Domain tasting is the use of legitimate ICANN-approved processes to
register a domain, test if there is any substantial traffic (perhaps
because it was recently in use by someone else or is similar to
another regularly used domain), and if not, cancel the registration
at no net cost to the registrant.

The issue of domain tasting has been regularly been discussed since
the phenomena began in 2005 - and with good reason. In January 2005,
before the practice was common, for .com and .net, there were about
1.7 million domains registered and 0.7 million domains deleted for a
net increase of 1.0 million domains. By the end of the month, there
were just over 40 million total domains registered.

Two years later, at the end of January 2007, the total number of
domains had increased by 78% to 72 million domains. However, in
January 2007, there were 51 million domains registered and 48 million
domains deleted. That is, there was a net increase of 3 million
names, but most of the rest were just being "tasted".

In the period since January 2007, the practice has grown even more.
Although the practice is relatively widely used, the majority of
tasting was being done by just three registrars, all of which have
the same address, telephone number and formation date.

The ALAC initiated the formal investigation of domain tasting by
requesting that ICANN develop an Issues Report. This was done with
the support of several GNSO constituencies. Ultimately, the Issues
Report was delivered to the GNSO and at the ICANN meeting in Los
Angeles, the GNSO decided to undertake a PDP with the intent of
further understanding the effects of domain tasting and if
appropriate, recommend measures to impede domain tasting.

The ALAC is not only pleased that the GNSO has taken this action, but
is particularly pleased that the action was taken with a 72% vote
where only >33% was required to initiate a PDP. This indicated wide
GNSO constituency support for the action. Although each constituency
may have different reasons for supporting the process, it is
nonetheless encouraging that the end target is the same.

The GNSO has chosen to solicit constituency statements and most
likely will create one or more working groups to further investigate
domain tasting.

From the ALAC's perspective, our main concerns were raised in the
request for the Issues Report and with the possible exception of the
reference to Facilitation of Criminal Activity, the positions remain
valid. The ALAC advocates any and all actions that will reduce or
eliminate domain tasting. It will support the PDP in whatever ways
are most productive to better understand the impacts of domain
tasting and to ultimately meet this end.

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