Re: AUCTIONING EXPIRED DOMAIN NAMES
AUCTIONING EXPIRED DOMAIN NAMES - GOOD OR BAD FOR CONSUMERS? - ICANN also recently posted an "advisory" to raise awareness of plans by two registrars to begin directly selling or auctioning expired domain registrations. If registrants fail to renew their domain names at the conclusion of an expiration grace period, NSI and Tucows plan to auction the rights to these domain names, instead of allowing them to "drop back into the pool" of names available for re-registration on a first-come, first-served basis, as is currently the process. Both registrars plan to give part of the auction price to the prior registrant (NSI plans to give 20% or less, Tucows plans to give about 80%). Is this good for registrants? Should registrars have the right to control and auction these names and, if so, what is ICANN's role? What might this mean for ICANN's delete policy and Verisign's proposed wait list service? Do you have an opinion? Post your views via email to <forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>. Domain names are registered in the names of the end users. The registrars merely hold the details of who owns what. They have no rights to the the domain names. If they wish to offer an auction service to owners who no-longer want their domains, they should be free to do so. It costs nothing to create a new domain. The cost is purely in clerical effort and on-net support (DNS etc). When we say we are 'buying' a domain name we are not buying anything, not even a license to use. We are paying for a service to be provided against a selected unique character string. If payment ceases, the service can be stopped, but the reference string merely ceases to be relevant; it, as a domain name, is not 'owned' by anyone. In the UK, a government body called the DVLC maintains a register of who owns which car and who has paid the annual licence fee. If someone stops paying the annual fee for a car, should the DVLC be able to auction off that car? -- David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK. Chair of HPUX SysAdmin SIG of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk) dledger@xxxxxxxxxxx www.ivdcs.co.uk |