Comments re Registrar Evaluation & Accreditation

["Barbara Madonik" <madonik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Sir/Madam,
I very much appreciate that ICANN is doing its best to evaluate registrar
applications and hope it tightens the reins as much as possible. Recently I
have experienced disturbing activity in the form of correspondence from
"registrars".
I, and others, have been sent email from people or companies purporting to
be registrars.  The email senders state they are contacting the domain owner
because some "authorized"' company wants to buy my company's domain name
with ICANN's newly-approved country designations. They continue that I must
reply quickly (usually within 5 days) or the domain name with a myriad of
top-level country designations will be sold to the applicant.
When I do reply stating that the so-called company (if it exists) is not
authorized by my company to act in this manner, I always receive another
email.  This one warns that my company must either buy all the names from
the "registrar" or the "registrar" will sell these new names (which always
include some form of my company's domain name) to someone else.
Frankly, I believe these contacts come as a result of web crawling to
identify legitimate domain owners.  In the most recent case, I decided to
check with ICANN who informed me that the email sender was not even a
registrar.
There are two issues that have become particularly problematic since ICANN
approved new-top level country designations:
.         Legitimate domain owners continue to be bombarded with scams like
the one I described above;
.         The new top-level country designations are allowing domain names,
owned by companies who spent years to establish excellent reputations, to be
combined with the newly-approved suffixes. As a result, the buyers of the
new-level names are able to highjack or redirect information to their sites
(from the web) as soon as the core domain name is typed into a search.
Thank you for your attention to my comments.
Yours truly,
Barbara Madonik
President, Unicom Communication Consultants Inc.
Email: madonik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  
Website: www.unicomcommunication.com
 
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