I am Vice President of the Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC) of the GNSO and chair of the Registration Practice and DNS Administration subcommittee of the Internet committee of the International Trademark Association. I am also a former Names Council representative to the GNSO representing the IPC. While I am making these comments on my own behalf, INTA is likewise extremely concerned with this proposed amendment and would like to reserve the right to submit further comments on its own behalf. First, thank you for the opportunity to submit comments in connection with the referenced matter. I strongly disagree with PIR's proposed solution to the domain name tasting problem. Domain name tasting is an abusive registration practice and ICANN's approval of this amendment to the .org Registry Agreement would effectively legitimize this practice. The five day grace period created by ICANN was originally intended to allow registrars who had mistyped a domain name to return them to the registry for a full refund, or to allow registrars to obtain a full refund in the event that a registrant's payment did not clear. In both cases, such mistakes or non-payment should simply be a cost of doing business, as is the case for any company that decides to go into business. I can think of no business where a company is fully and immediately reimbursed for non-payment by one of its customers. Moreover, even assuming arguendo that the origins of the five day grace period were virtuous, its widespread abuse warrants its elimination. According to the Coalition Against Domain Name Fraud, "[t]he majority opinion amongst industry insiders is that approximately 30 million domain names are currently being tasted." According to a BusinessWeek.com article (The Great Internet Brand Rip-Off, December 15, 2006): "The practice has soared in the past two years. In late 2004, roughly 100,000 domain names were tested on any given day, and now, the number has ballooned to 4 million, according to Jay Westerdal, chief executive officer of the domain name consultancy firm Name Intelligence. Experts estimate that less than 2% of the sites that are tried out for a few days are ultimately purchased by registrants." Not only does this practice take millions of good domain names off the market, it is my understanding that this practice places an unnecessary burden on each registry and an unnecessary load on the domain name system. This in turn jeopardizes the stability of the DNS in clear contravention to one of the "Core Values" set forth in ICANN's bylaws (http://www.icann.org/general/archive-bylaws/bylaws-28feb06.htm#I). Under the proposed amendment, a US$.05 (five cents) excess deletion fee is proposed. For the same reason that the low domain name registration fees (i.e., US$5-10) have not acted as a deterrent against abusive conduct (see, http://www.wipo.int/edocs/prdocs/en/2007/wipo_pr_2007_479.html indicating that the number of domain name disputes filed with WIPO has increased by 25% as compared to 2005), surely ICANN cannot reasonably believe that five cents will act as a deterrent. Moreover, this excess deletion fee only applies to those registrars in which the "Grace Period Deletes" during any thirty (30) day period are in excess of ninety percent (90%) of the number of initial registrations made by the registrar over the relevant time period as determined by PIR. Not only does this high threshold remove the "teeth" from this proposed amendment and severely limit the actual application of this fee, leaving the length of the time period open ended and at the sole discretion of PIR makes it almost meaningless. Instead, I direct ICANN to take a more proactive approach to solving the domain name tasting problem, and refer ICANN to Nominet's efforts in this regard which is taking action against any registrar that uses the delete operation in its automatic system other that for the correction of registration errors (see http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,39020369,39280558,00.htm). Thank you for your time and consideration. Caroline G. Chicoine Thompson Coburn LLP One USBank Plaza St. Louis, MO 63101 cchicoine@thompsoncoburn.com