RE: [gnso-pro-wg] NEW APPROACH TO WORK OF WG

["Bruce Tonkin" <Bruce.Tonkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Kristina,


                4)       Registries believe that the existing mechanisms
are too costly (both in terms of business, operations, support and
legal) and present a burden to introducing new gTLDs.

I can confirm that IP protection mechanisms in recent TLD launches have
been very resource intensive for Melbourne IT as a registrar, and these
costs have been passed onto our corporate customers.   I have heard
complaints from some of these customers about the high costs for them
that new TLDs (whether cctld or gtld) seem to impose.

Ultimately there is an issue associated with domain name registrations
that seem to be aimed to trade on the goodwill of corporate brands.
The issue is that any solutions need to look at the life-cycle costs for
all participants (ie not just a TLD launch), as well as the balance of
costs - ie the economic incentives.  For example outside of sunrise the
costs for someone to register a brand or misspelling of the brand, and
run some advertising for products related to that brand is low compared
to the cost for a registrar or corporate to undertake processes such as
WHOIS data checking, UDRP, legal action etc.  This is particularly the
case when the current add-grace period is taken into account.

It would be interesting to consider how other industries cope with
similar economic issues.   For example, how to hotels or apartment
landlords protect the value of their property from a person that may
just stay overnight.  Or how do car rental companies protect their
expensive cars for a day rental.

I guess in general the approaches seem to be:

- better authentication of the user up-front so that they can be held
accountable for costs  (e.g hotels/car rental companies will usually ask
for photo id, credit cards etc)

Or

- some form of bond payment made upfront (common for apartment rentals
for example)

It is probably interesting to contrast the activity in TLDs that have
some form of up-front authentication versus TLDs that do not.



Regards,
Bruce Tonkin