So as not to blindside everyone on the Council call, to allow discussion by the DT-WG team prior to the Council meeting and to avoid additional delays, I want to alert you to a position agreed to by a strong majority of RyC members in our regular meeting earlier today. Regarding the consensus policy motion to be put out for public comment, most of us in the RyC believe that it would be much better if clause 2 of the motion was deleted before putting the motion out for public comment. My attempt to describe our thinking in that regard follows.

First let me cut and paste clause 2 here: " The above restriction on use of the Add Grace Period shall be considered an “ICANN adopted specification or polic[y] prohibiting or restricting warehousing of or speculation in domain names by registrars” in accordance with Section 3.7.9 of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement. As such, a Registrar that engages in domain tasting, defined as using the AGP to register domain names in order to test their profitability, shall be deemed in material breach of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement."

Our concerns include the following:

The wording of this clause appears to set a policy prohibiting domain name warehousing and domain name speculation, which was not the topic of this PDP, nor were warehousing or speculation specified as issues to be covered in the Domain Tasting PDP that the Council initiated.
Even if we accept the fact that domain tasting is a subset of domain warehousing or domain speculation, we believe that warehousing and speculation involve more than domain tasting.
If a policy is to be developed regarding the broader issues of domain name warehousing and domain name speculation, then a PDP should be considered in that regard, but it would not be appropriate to set such a policy without a thorough review of all of the issues associated with warehousing and speculation including those unrelated to domain tasting.
Clause 2 does not seem to add anything to the motion with regard to domain tasting; it is our belief that no amendment would be necessary in either registry agreements or the RAA in order to implement the policy because both registries and registrars already have terms in their agreements with ICANN that require us to implement consensus policies. Therefore, if the Council sends the policy recommendation to the Board and the Board approves it as a consensus policy, then registries and registrars will be required to implement it. Deleting clause 2 would not seem to change that scenario at all.
Leaving clause 2 in the motion for public comment will likely distract from the main thrust of the motion by causing people to focus on the broader issues of warehousing and speculation as well as on definitions of terms like 'profitability'; moreover, GNSO processes could be challenged because of the point made in bullet one above.
Leaving clause 2 in the motion could complicate the goal of completing the PDP in a timely manner.

The RyC has never taken a position regarding the broader issues of domain name warehousing or domain name speculation nor are we advocating one way or another regarding such a policy, but we do believe that any such policy should be developed following existing PDP procedures, making sure that an in-depth examination of all the related issues happens, not just those related to a subset of those topics related to domain name tasting.

In conclusion, the RyC suggests that clause 2 of the consensus policy motion be deleted. The RyC instructed its Council reps to support the motion to put the consensus policy motion out for public comment and to request updated constituency impact statements to address the consensus policy motion, but we strongly recommend that clause 2 be deleted before the motion is acted on.

Chuck Gomes

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