[gnso-pednr-dt] ICANN/Compliance statistics for your consideration

[William McKelligott <William.McKelligott@xxxxxxxxx>]

Members of the PEDNR WG,

As promised, Compliance looked into the statistics for complaints from the 
community concerning the transfer of domain names that have expired.

The complaints Compliance receives are largely sent to ICANN via 
http://reports.internic.net/cgi/registrars/problem-report.cgi, which can be 
accessed on ICANN's website.  From them, Compliance compiles statistics, which 
also take into account phone calls handled by the front desk at our office in 
Marina del Rey, CA.

It is important to highlight that the complaints and categories they are filed 
under are self-reported;  Compliance plays a limited role in their 
classification.  More specifically, one of our staff reads a complaint, 
re-categorizes it (if needed), and then forwards it to the relevant party for 
resolution.  That being said, in some instances the complainant may erroneously 
categorize his or her concern and may emphasize an actor (registrar), a concept 
(registrar service), a specific problem (redemption or domain name transfer), 
etc., and the text accompanying the complaint may not provide the full details 
of the case to warrant a reclassification.   So, by reading into the complaints 
face value (i.e., defined as the category under which they are filed and the 
extent to which they go unmodified during Compliance's initial review), the 
statistics may not fully capture what the problem actually is.  Simply stated, 
since complaints raised by registrants involving post expiration domain name 
recovery issues could be filed under several different categories and still be 
"accurate," it is a bit challenging to quantify the prevalence of the problem; 
the narrower the approach taken to read into the statistics, the smaller the 
problem appears to be within the larger number of complaints we receive.

As of July 31, 2009, the Compliance team received the following complaints 
(ytd):

[cid:3332766314_1019729]

A further breakdown of the "transfer problems" category in the complaint 
statistics is not done and the system used for complaint intake does not allow 
for this.  However, a search within the text submitted with each complaint 
using the terms "expired" and/or "redemption" revealed that of the 1642 
transfer problems reported so far, 644 complainants used these terms to 
describe their problem.  Notice, however, that "redemption" is also a 
stand-alone category (that the complainants chose not to use to file under).  
This offers some insight on possible misunderstandings the community faces when 
it comes to filing complaints and knowing which category would be more accurate 
to file under.

Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.

William A. McKelligott
Auditor, Contractual Compliance Team
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
1875 I (Eye) Street, NW, Suite 501   Washington, DC  20006   United States of 
America
P (202) 429-2709
F (202) 429-2714
M (310) 409-9763
william.mckelligott@xxxxxxxxx

Did you know? ICANN is responsible for the global coordination of the 
Internet's system of unique identifiers. These include domain names (like .com, 
.uk, and .jobs), as well as the addresses used in a variety of Internet 
protocols. Computers use these identifiers to reach each other over the 
Internet. Learn more at http://icann.org