Comments on Draft Registrar Disqualification Procedure

[Joe St Sauver <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I write today to express my personal support for 
the new proposed registrar disqualification procedure. 

That said, I believe that this proposal would be 
materially strengthened if examples were provided 
describing concrete examples of the sort of "harms" 
envisioned in section 3. 

 From my perspective, I see at least three broad 
categories of "harms" which deserve attention:

1) Harms to ICANN Itself

For instance, consider a registrar which (for whatever 
reason) is routinely allowing bogus point of contact
information to be entered into domain whois data.

Those errors often subsequently result in WDPRS reports 
about the inaccuracies, sometimes at volumes that stagger 
ICANN's staff or systems. That sort of registrar behavior
is a prime example of a harm to ICANN which I hope and 
believe the proposed new policy might help to address.

2) Harms to Registries

Or consider the harm to a registry which occurs 
if/when a spammer decides to broadly employ large 
numbers of domains from a particular TLD. I'm sure we can 
all think of gTLDs which suffered substantial damage to 
deliverability and domain values when spammers decided 
that they really liked domains from a particular TLD.

Empowering and requiring relevant authorities to take 
timely action against abused domains will preserve 
deliverability of traffic associated with legitimate 
domain holders, and protect the value of domains 
(and TLD brands!) which might otherwise suffer 
substantial and potentially irreparable diminution.

3) Harms to Registrants

Another clear example of a "harm" would be damage 
to registrants which might occur when a registrar 
whose associated privacy service provides effectively 
no means for routine contact with a private domain
registrant. 

Thus, for example, if someone were to file a UDRP 
action against a domain and the panelist(s) reviewing 
that case were to attempt to contact the domain holder, 
the registrar's privacy service "/dev/null" delivery
process might summarily discard that contact attempt 
with the result that the intent of the UDRP process 
is frustrated registrant might lose their domain by 
default -- a clear harm to the registrant.

Or consider a registrar intentionally trying to trick
users into changing registrars, or a registrar who might
make it unconscienably difficult to transfer a domain 
in an effort to avoid curstomer churn. Again, clear 
harms, and hopefully harms that the new proposed policy 
will allow ICANN to definitively address in their
work with registrars, registries and registrants.

If you do elect to incorporate examples of the sort
mentioned above, please also be sure to clarify that
the enumeration of specific examples is meant to be
illustrative but not exhaustive; obviously there are
many other potential examples of harms which the
proposed policy could also work to ameliorate beyond
the few examples mentioned above.

Thank you for your work on this policy, and for 
considering these comments.

Best regards,

Joe

Disclaimer: all opinions strictly my own.