All, you might have noticed some pieces of news out there on the story of Registerfly, a registrar which is apparently failing to pay its registry dues and thus to renew their registrants' domains, and all other sorts of bad behaviour (see www.registerflies.com). A month ago or so, I had already forwarded to the Board list a message from the GA list, about other problems with a reseller (including the typical one "my reseller listed themselves, rather than me, as the registrant"). As you might know, often ICANN says that this falls outside of its mandate, and into the mandate of local consumer protection regulations. At the same time, I think that there are many things that ICANN could do, from education (e.g. better information to point out registrants to appropriate authorities) to consensus building (for example working to develop best industry practices for registrars and resellers for what pertains to how to deal with their customers) and to actual regulation (for example adding to the registrar accreditation agreements clauses that require registrars and their resellers to follow such best practices). I would like to use these cases to push the Board to set up a specific working group with the task of finding out some actions that ICANN could do to get to better consumer protection. Thus, I would like to know whether this is a request that we all share, so that I can put it forward. Thanks, -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------