I have received the following comments on Domain Tasting from ISOC-AU, one of AP ALSes. I think they are great comments for our reference. izumi ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: cheryl@hovtek.com.au <cheryl@hovtek.com.au> Date: 2007/03/26 14:31 Subject: Re: [APAC-Discuss] ALAC Draft Resolution on Domain Tasting To: iza@anr.org Hello Izumi, I trust this email (later than I'd planned I'm afraid) finds you in Lisbon and in good health... I did manage to elicit some responses from my outreach efforts regarding your draft... Realising that our small contribution will be only part of what you receive rather than edit the text per se I include below the following comments, points and sentiments from those organisations / people who did respond... by COB Friday. Firstly, we must recognise that our experience here in .au is very different from the gTLD world? here we have considerable public interest and individual user input into our Domain Name system and policy development and we also (in many ways *because* of this input) have strong rules such as our eligibility criteria for all of our Open 2ld?s? see http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2005-02/ These rules go a long way towards giving our Domain Name users and general public interest of the Internet a great deal of security and confidence in names in the .au space? so even our consumer advocacy groups such as CTN see www.ctn.org.au have had little direct experiences of the types of frustrations that those only accessing the open slather gTLD?s and may therefore be at some variance with those public interest and consumer protection driven views? Further in October 2005 http://www.auda.org.au/news-archive/auda-14102005/ & March 2006 http://www.auda.org.au/pdf/auda-domainmon-public.pdf auDA undertook a public consultation process regarding Domain Monetisation and this resulted in the publication of our auDA Policy Clarification of Close and Substantial Connection Rule - Domain Monetisation (2006-03) on 20 July 2006. A full list9ing of the public submissions received can be found at http://www.auda.org.au/reviews/monetisation-2006/ and I specifically stated in my distribution of your draft document that I would be pointing these references out to you for use by the ALAC, and that therefore no reiteration of those specific points needed to be made by the respondents. In general, support, was received for the intent of the text you provided as Draft resolutions to the various councils on Domain Tasting but not for the text titled ?On Domain Monitization? Based upon this and on the background information provided previously in this report, the following important points were made by our respondents. -That the ALAC is to be encouraged to express their request in terms relating specifically to ICANN's mission and core values. e.g. part of ICANN's mission is to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems, and one of its core values is preserving and enhancing the operational stability, reliability, security, and global interoperability of the Internet. -Any issues report that is produced through the ICANN policy development process, will need to answer whether the issue is within ICANN's mission and core values - rather than whether the issue is indeed something of importance to end users. SO rewording of the draft should consider this point to maxamise the likelyhood of a successful outcome. -ICANN is not explicitly a consumer protection body. If it is purely a consumer protection issue - then the first point of contact could well be a registrar code of conduct, or perhaps alerting the relevant consumer protection bodies in each country - e.g Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in Australia, or the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the USA to investigate. An example of such a code of conduct, as it operates in Australia, can be found at http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2004-04/ and the committee process by which this was developed can be followed in documents linked from the following page http://www.auda.org.au/cop/cop-index/ and a full list of auDA Panels and committee activities past and present can be found at http://www.auda.org.au/panels/panels-index/ I've attached this text as a word doc and a .PDF so the links will be live for you to use with the ALAC should you see fit. Kindest regards, Cheryl Langdon-Orr (CLO) Quoting Izumi AIZU <iza@anr.org>:
Dear ALAC/RALO/ALS people,
At the last ALAC conference call, I volunteered to write some draft resolution for ALAC on Domain Tasting (and Domain monetization).
With my limited knowledge, I rather hesitate, but put forward the following as a very crude draft. I owe much part to John Levin's comment (on internal list months ago), who unfortunately left ALAC recently. I hope John still watch this open list and make further contribution, together with all others.
I repeat this is very very crude, and I am aware that some porposals may not be readily accepted by you guys, especially in the area of domain monetization.
I still feel that the speculation is not for the interest of ordinary users, perhaps OK with Domainers as new and innovative industry. For that, I really like you to come up with clear and convincing ideas and solutions. This draft is just a step stone for that.
Thanks,
izumi
*Draft Resolution on Domain Tasting ICANN AtLarge Advisory Committee (ALAC)
V. 0.8 Mar 12 2007* *
* On behalf of the ordinary Internet users, AtLarge Advisory Committee (ALAC) would like to propose the following actions to be taken by the ICANN Community on Domain Tasting and Domain Monetization.
*To gNSO Council:* Start a Policy Development Process on Domain Tasting. We believe that Domain Tasting is an abuse of existing Five-day Add Grace Period which results confusion for the ordinary Internet users and give unfair treatment to peculiar speculators. We propose to abandon the five day "Add Grace period".
*To Registrars Constituency:* Finalize and implement Registrars Code of Conduct that prohibits unfair speculation and exploitation on Domain name registration including the use of five day Add Grace period.
*To Registry Constituency:* We request the registries to consider how to avoid user confusion and unfair practices by abolishing the five day add grace period. Adding small fee, such as 25 cents per Domain to those registrants who kept their names using add grace period may be one solution, but we are not fully convinced. *To ICANN Board: *We request ICANN Board to seriously consider how to prohibit unfair speculation, enhance consumer trust to Domain Name registration system, by a) Initiating a third party study on the impact of Domain Tasting and Domain Monetization/speculation to the ordinary Internet users. b) Initiating review of Registry ? Registrar Contract that will promote the fair trade and restrict unfair speculation.
*Background and Rationale:* Domain tasting uses the five day add grace period to register domains without paying for them. We think they are unfair acts: somewhere between larceny and extortion, because the registration cost is zero and the purpose of these registrations is just to make money taking advantage of automated bulk registration to exploit the domain names which are the public goods in essence.
As many people have noted, it's exploiting a loophole that shouldn't be there in the first place. There was a great deal of debate both in the ICANN community and on the ICANN board about the deletion grace period, but none at all about add grace which was apparently tossed into the package by an ICANN staffer without asking anyone. So says Karl Auerbach, who was on the board at the time, and I haven't seen anything to the contrary from any other board member.
As Bob Parsons wrote in his blog: *Millions of good .COM domain names ? on any given day over 3.5 million and climbing ? are unfairly made unavailable to small businesses and others who would actually register and use them in ways for which the names were intended. Many times businesses accidentally let their domain names expire. When they go to renew them, they find they have been snapped up ? and taken away with a huge expensive hassle to follow ? by an add/drop registrar. * (http://www.bobparsons.com/adddropscheme.html)
The usual explanation of domain tasting says that the registrars register millions of domains, watch the traffic, and then after 4.9 days they delete the ones that don't seem likely to make back the US$6.00. Often they just delete them all and then reregister what they can a few minutes later until they find the ones which produce enough traffic that yields well above $6 cost.
The add grace period is just a mistake. The problem it purports to solve is not and never was an important one. If you let an important domain expire, you risk losing the entire investment made in that domain over many years. But if one registers a domain by mistake, the most one risks is the ten or twenty dollars you paid to register it.
*On Domain Monetization* We note that there is a meaningful difference between domain tasting and domain monetization. Monetization is a straightforward arbitrage between the cost of domain registrations and the revenue from as much pay-per-click traffic as the domain owner can get from people who visit web sites in the domain. It's a fundamentally sleazy business, since the web sites have no useful content and the way they get the traffic is basically by tricking people, either via typos or recently expired domains.
We do not think it is appropriate in this case to make ICANN as a regulator to watch and prohibit the Domain monetization practice. Instead, we like to ask those commercial activities such as Google or Overture to stop paying for clicks on pages with no content, thereby dealing with a problem that is not limited to typo and expired domains. We've seen click arbitrage, people buying Google ads to drive traffic to pages that are simply other Google ads. This kind of self-generating traffic for pay-per-click advertising is confusing and unnecessary for ordinary Internet users and , in the long run, not healthy for the development of Internet as a whole.
END
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