Re: [gnso-pednr-dt] cost of recovery during Registrar grace period.

["Michele Neylon :: Blacknight" <michele@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10 Jan 2010, at 04:10, Sivasubramanian Muthusamy wrote:

> Thank You for this explanation. If the Recovery process is different from 
> that of the automated Create, Transfer, Renew process and if it requires 
> human involvement, then the cost of this process is bound to be a little 
> higher, so the Registries are likely to charge a higher fee which gets passed 
> on to the Registrants.

You're missing a very important part of the relationship

It's registry > registrar > registrant

And if you're not dealing with a registrar directly then it would be:

registry > registrar > reseller > registrant

and there could be more than one reseller level

Each level involves human interaction and costs, both direct and indirect. 


> I also agree with Michele's line of reasoning justifying a higher fee - to 
> some extent - while I differ from him in that $75 would indeed be a lot of 
> money for Registrants from several geographic regions.  
> In my example, I wonder if the Registry in  India would have fixed this fee 
> in the realm of INR 4000. 

Citing .in is not pertinent

If you must insist on citing a cctld use .eu 

The fees are published on the public site:

http://www.eurid.eu/en/become-registrar/prepayment-fees


However, .eu does not work in the same way as .in, much as co.uk doesn't 
either, nor does .fr or .de or .no or .es

In any case it is irrelevant how much the registry charges the registrar, apart 
from it being a higher fee.

> 
> One example can not possibly be considered as representative of practices 
> across the industry

Agreed


> , but  could indicate a possibility and lead to further examples and findings.

 It is outside this WG's scope to spend time on a perceived issue with a cctld


> The possibilities here are that there may be other Registrars and Resellers 
> who take advantage of the situation of possible panic ( "Your domain has 
> expired ... and has been deleted from your account. You cannot renew it now. 
> However, you still have one last chance,,," ) to charge even more 
> disproportionately. Or practices that might make the Registrants to leave 
> more domain names un-recovered than in an environment of affordable recovery 
> fees. 

We've had lengthy discussions over the last few months about the various 
policies regarding expiry, deletion and recovery and ICANN staff have conducted 
a survey of registrars. This seems to be old territory


> 
> The trouble with this working group is that most or all of the Registrar 
> members are very possibly Registrars with fair practices and they are judging 
> the rest of the Registrars and Resellers by their  own standards.

That's not entirely true. As registrars we have to deal with registrants who 
have registered names with a very wide gamma of registrars. Not all of those 
registrars have policies or modus operandi that members of this group would 
find palatable and to assume that we are ignorant of this is a gross over 
simplification



>  Not all Registrars and Resellers are fair when there is room for 
> exploitation.

What exactly is exploitation in this context? It's an incredibly vague term and 
could be interpreted to mean any number of things for different people


> What my example showed is that there is indeed room for exploitation which 
> manifests in this case as $75 and in some other cases as $750. 


Your example is for a ccTLD and you have not provided an example of $750, but 
one of $75

> 
> The ccTLD example is still relevant because it is the same gTLD Registrars 
> and Resellers who handle ccTLDs.  

That is factually incorrect

In common with all ccTLDS, .in registrars do not have to be ICANN accredited. 

To be a registrar for gTLDs you have to be ICANN accredited.

There are only 68 .in registrars. 
(http://www.registry.in/Accredited_Registrars) 

There are over 900 ICANN accredited registrars


> I still don't feel compelled to leave ccTLDs alone from all this discussions. 

ccTLD registries are not governed by ICANN policy or contract
ccTLD registrars are not bound by the terms of the RAA or ICANN consensus 
policy. They are usually bound by the ccTLD registry operator's agreements and 
the national law of the country connected to the ccTLD.

This working group has a specific topic to address and it is evident that for 
us to be able to address that topic effectively, and actually make progress, 
that the group has to focus on its core agenda. 

While we have looked at some of the data from ccTLDs in the past nobody was 
ever suggesting that we try to address any perceived issues of policy in the 
cctlds. For example, it is not uncommon for Irish courts to make reference to 
court cases in other jurisdictions when there is a lack of case law in our 
domestic corpus. No Irish judge would even consider doing more than being 
"influenced" by an existing judgement. 

As James rightly pointed out, if we were to even consider discussing ccTLD 
registry policy the PEDNR side of things would be quite far down the list of 
priorities for most of us.

> 
> And @Michele, it is not 'Utopian' to consider similar standards among gTLDs 
> and ccTLDs merely because "there is absolutely no way that anything we 
> discuss here is going to have any impact on the ccTLDs." 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia

There are over 200 ccTLDs. Each one of them has different policies, rules, 
block lists, pricing, contracts, lack of contracts, API, no API, web forms, 
EPP, EPP variants, email forms etc., etc., 

One Caribbean ccTLD has incredibly helpful and polite staff, but it still takes 
30 days for a domain registration to be processed.

Some ccTLDs only allow 1 year registrations, others only allow 2, while others 
offer up to 10 years

Compare that to gTLDs

They all use EPP.
They all have contracts with ICANN.
While there are some policy differences in the sponsored gTLDs, the general 
gTLDs all have pretty much the same policies


> 
> Because a certain measure is difficult to implement we don't cease to 
> consider what is fair. 

Ok, you may wish to consider what you think is unjust about some cctld 
policies, but I don't think that this group is the place to do it. You might 
want to try raising the issue with CENTR or a similar body.

We need to be pragmatic.

Otherwise we might as well close this PDP and go back to the GNSO and tell them 
that it was a massive waste of time, as we couldn't make any progress and most 
of the members gave up attending out of frustration

Regards

Michele


Mr Michele Neylon
Blacknight Solutions
Hosting & Colocation, Brand Protection
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