George and all, Glad you swung in George ( of the jungle )! Must be a banana shortage amongst other food shortages in your neck of the jungle. >:) But more to the point, yes this is rather troubling indeed. And yes of course, registries like Verisign I am sure are watching very closely to see how ICANN responds and indeed may respond in kind. This request seems like a "Post-front-running" scheme to me... The real danger is that if approved, and/or practiced by afilias or other registries for political purposes to suppress speech, I am rather sure that the courts will need to be involved at some point to correct abusive registry practices such as this one could become or used for. However there is always an upside to this requests approach to dealing with abusive Domains, such as those the promote Child pornography, spam, and those that are frequently used for phishing purposes. Such a practice would relieve the ICANN staff from doing their oversight in this narrow but very important regard and at the same time send a message to other yet to be reveled or known abusive domain name registrants that they need to clean up their act, or face Registry damnation. But than again I thought that DMCA and LEA's and the courts is/are for addressing these abusive Domain name problems? If now these entities are not adequate as ACTA indicates, and perhaps the courts dockets are too inundated with filings as well as US-CERT.gov and IC3.GOV filed complaints are too numerous to address in a timely manner, than perhaps this request will act as a potential relief valve? -----Original Message-----

From: George Kirikos <gkirikos@yahoo.com> Sent: Jun 21, 2008 3:50 PM To: ga@gnso.icann.org Subject: [ga] Potential Danger Ahead for Registrants -- dot-info Abusive Domain Use Policy

Hi folks,

ICANN has posted a request by Afilias for a new registry service in relation to "abusive" domains in dot-info:

http://www.icann.org/registries/rsep/index.html#2008007 http://www.icann.org/registries/rsep/afilias-request-20jun08.pdf

While in general the proposal is motivated by good intentions, the devil is in the details. While most folks (including myself) probably care very little about the .info TLD, my concern is that any bad implementation in .info might be copied or used as a precedent in other more important TLDs, in particular .com run by VeriSign.

In particular:

"Pursuant to Section 3.6.5 of the RRA, Afilias reserves the right to deny, **cancel** or transfer any registration or transaction, or place any domain name(s) on registry lock, hold or similar status, that it deems necessary, **in its discretion**;........"

(emphasis added)

I would be against giving VeriSign (if the model was copied to .com) that discretionary power over my company's domains, especially the "right to cancel." What exactly is "illegal"? In China, I'm sure there are many things that are illegal that are perfectly legal in Canada, the USA or the EU. Suppose a domain name gets hacked for a brief time, and is temporarily used to serve up spam or malware, etc. That company experiencing bad luck, having their site hacked, can then be put totally out of business in the event that the registry operator, "in its discretion," decides to cancel the domain name.

Thus, I think concern should be raised that any implementation be very conservative in order to protect the inherent right of registrants to due process. The potential for harm in a bad implementation is enormous, and companies and individuals could be put out of business if a valuable domain name is taken from a registrant.

Sincerely,

George Kirikos http://www.kirikos.com/

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