All,
Firstly, I’m so sorry for the delay in responding and many thanks to all the Staff for taking this on for me - I’m very grateful. And at the risk of becoming a phantom, also apologies for the
1st meeting this afternoon: it clashes with the GAC-GNSO joint session.
I’ve made some comments inline below.
And to comment briefly on the “support” thread: I’m from the BC. I’m of course not representing the BC in this WG – I’m 100% here for my employer – but I hope this goes to show that no one member
of this WG speaks for the BC (indeed, for any C/SG) so that can’t be a “support measure” IMO.
Thanks again
Marie
Hello Marie,
We hope this email finds you well.
Staff helped present your proposal #13 to the WG during its 10 Oct meeting. You may reference
page 28-35 of
transcript and page 9-13 of the
AC chat record for the full record of discussion of your proposal.
Some WG members supported your proposal, while some opposed and/or expressed concerns. We have highlighted the WG’s
questions, oppositions, suggestions below. If you wish to respond, please be so kind to send your response via the WG mailing list. Thank you for your time and help!
Best Regards,
Mary, Julie, Ariel & Berry
==
- Michael Karanicolas:
What is the evidence supporting the claim that a losing respondent is able to reregister a domain name once it becomes available? Does it happen often? (Staff’s data: Up to 2017, recall
one domain that was re-registered by the original registrant. The domain was dropped after suspension and seemed to be legit use. There were other domains that were dropped and re-registered by a different registrant. Not a huge % but still significant.)
We based this on the comments in the Super Consolidated URS Topics Table, F(2)/Practitioners Sub-Team: “in some cases, a losing Respondent is able to re-register a domain once it becomes available”; “after
the lock, the cybersquatters just renew the domain name” – if it were an important enough concern to be in that Table, we thought it ought to be discussed further.
- Kristine Dorrain:
Strong disagreement -
It's absolutely impossible to implement. You cannot distinguish between registrants even within a registry or registrar. There's evidence that there are cyber squatters that have thousands of new accounts with new identities, and they can hop from place to
place and even between registrars. How can those people be prevented from registering the domain name? Assuming a registrar/registry can identify a single customer (who hasn’t opened a new account), how would that information be included across hundreds of
registrars? As a complainant, let's say you win a URS and the domain is immediately re-registered. How will you know if the registrant is the same? How will you enforce this proposal? How would ICANN enforce this proposal?
We hadn’t gone into implementation, but in essence: we’d like to disrupt the business model of those who abuse the system – as we assume everyone here would, as it negatively affects us all! Could we consider the systematic verification
of a registrant’s data when they are trying to register a domain name that has been the subject of a URS where the Complainant prevailed? Connected to a common database of such cases to which all Registrars/Registries would have access?
- George Kirikos: There's no registrant verification taking place, so it would be nearly impossible for
a registrar to handle it on their own, let alone having all registrars potentially block one registrant from registering the relevant domain name at the other registrar. How can we overcome these technical problems with regard to implementation? There is no
“know your client” requirement for registrars to know the registrant. Also, what if the WHOIS of the registrant is fake?
The lack of KYC and fake info are without doubt huge problems. Data accuracy is something I know we would all love to work towards.
- Maxim Alzoba:
There are two issues with this proposal. 1) It would create gaming concerns, as the registrant can simply use false contact information. Wouldn’t it be great if they couldn’t...
But also – as said in the proposal – it could actually reduce gaming. (“This would help to prevent gaming of the system and unnecessary cluttering of the providers’ workload with spurious
or vexatious cases”).
2) For registrars, there is almost no way to identify the person behind it – it could be a good guys’ domain name that is stolen and used for bad things, and the registrars cannot share information with those
parties outside the law. There are no safeguards for the situation where trademark is no longer protected. There is no way to identify a bad guy before they do something fishy or before they follow a pattern. They would have done here
– that’s exactly the point. Maybe something limited could be implemented, such as limiting the registration of this domain name for one year.
- Christine Farley: If a registrant has been shown to have a bad faith in registering a domain, does it
mean that all future registrations will be in bad faith? Or might it be possible for that registrant to re-register that domain with a good faith in future?
Is that not a bit unrealistic?
- Griffin Barnet: Could perhaps link the registrant to his/her email address, payment info, or something
more unique to the actual registrant? Maxim Alzoba: Payment info does not propagate further than one registrar and potentially ICANN. See idea above re a database.
- Justine Chew: Could perhaps use a blacklist to identify "losing respondent" as named by that party itself,
even if they used false name, contact info etc.
Interesting.