FW: comments on .com registry agreement

[Marilyn Cade <marilynscade@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

TO:  ICANNRe:  Comments on the .com registry agreement: This is an excellent 
opportunity to provide some brief comments regarding the .com registry 
agreement.  My comments are made in my individual capacity, but I think are 
reflective of the views of many business users who are registrants in .com. In 
my view, stability in the operations of the .com registry must be a primary 
concern to business users.  The information provided by Verisign in the .com 
documents and posted for public comment cover Verisign's ability to fulfill 
those critical requirements.    
And, along with the stability and security of the .com registry operations, for 
business users, accurate, accessible, and thick WHOIS for .com registrations is 
important to businesses. Moving to thick WHOIS for .com should be discussed 
with Verisign as part of the contract discussions. This would move .com into a 
parity situation with the new gTLDs, and with the majority of the legacy 
generic TLDs.  Finally, on a second topic, I was a member of the ICANN Reserved 
Names Working Group -- during the work of that group, we examined the issues 
behind why single letters and numbers at the second level are still on reserve, 
and recommended that they be released.  .info and .biz and other registries 
have proceeded to release and allocate the second level single letters.   It is 
now time for Verisign to work with ICANN to follow the model used for .info and 
.biz in the release and allocation process for single letters at the second 
level, and do that as soon as possible.  I advise a company who is interested 
in one of the single letters, but during the process of the Reserved Names 
Working Group, it became clear that there may be many companies who have a 
brand name that can be associated with a single letter and a release and 
allocation process like the one used for .info and .biz will allow such 
companies to pursue registration. ICANN and Verisign should proceed on this as 
quickly as possible. 
Marilyn Cade