Summary & Analysis of Comments

[Patrick Jones <patrick.jones@xxxxxxxxx>]

Summary & Analysis of Comments for:
.INFO Phased Equitable Reallocation of Non-Compliant Sunrise Names

The comment period ran from 3 April to 2 May 2009. Two comments were received - 
one from Michele Neylon of Blacknight Solutions and the other in French from 
Sam Bavafa of Domaine.fr. The public comments on the proposed contract 
amendment can be found at http://forum.icann.org/lists/info-sunrise-amendment/.

Michele suggested that Afilias should make their process for use of funds from 
auction as transparent as possible. "One of my concerns with this proposal is 
that without there being a certain
degree of transparency there is very little to stop the registry operator from 
putting a lot of the names up for auction directly...While I am not asking 
Afilias to become a charity over night I would seriously question their 
underlying motives for the auctions."

He also questioned part of the Afilias proposal regarding registration fee 
reductions to registrars. "Registrants won't benefit from that. Registrars 
obviously will, but that Afilias would affirm that this would benefit 
registrants is either misinformed, misleading or simply naive." See 
http://forum.icann.org/lists/info-sunrise-amendment/msg00001.html.

Sam Bavafa expressed concern for the registrants of names to be reallocated, 
who have been able to maintain domain names for over eight years.

"According to the French legislation, possession means property and even if we 
can't consider a domain name as a personal property, it generates rights 
anyway. The customer doesn't have the knowledge of a registrar and therefore 
can't understand why he might use a domain name that doesn't belong to him/her 
for more than 8 years. He/she doesn't understand either why his/her name is 
still listed as the registered name holder while he/she's not supposed to hold 
the domain name or why the registry that says he/she may not have it doesn't 
block the access to it.

How could you explain the situation to the concerned customers knowing that, if 
we take our own example, there are 5 of them who created full services around 
their domain names; an identity was created around these names."

Sam suggested that "the most logical solution would be to recognise that a 
mistake was made during the Sunrise period and that the fact to leave these 
domain names work generated a right to the 'wrong owners'. Then if someone 
thinks that one of the domain names should belong to him/her, that person would 
have a grace period to challenge the right to the domain name, like it was done 
during the Sunrise period. Then a proceeding could be started with the WIPO 
under the same financial conditions as for the challenge system that applied 
during the Sunrise
period."

"That solution would be better than taking the domain names away from their 
current registrants and then releasing them either according to the 1st arrived 
1st served rule or via an auction, as it would only benefit to speculators and 
wouldn't be fair to the people that could use them during 8 years."

(Note - this is a summary of the translation from French). See 
http://forum.icann.org/lists/info-sunrise-amendment/msg00000.html.

--
Patrick L. Jones
Registry Liaison Manager &
Support to ICANN Nominating Committee
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
Tel: +1 310 301 3861
patrick.jones@xxxxxxxxx
patrickjones.tel