Verisign's Latest Proposals - Caution Please

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

Verisign has submitted two proposals which potentially impact on registrars' 
business practices

Registry-Registrar Two-Factor Authentication Service - while some aspects of 
this proposal are not abhorrent Verisign's proposal interrupts the relationship 
between registrars, registries and registrants.
If registrars wish to offer a higher level of security to their clients this 
should be their choice, however I have reservations with the registry operator 
forcing changes that will affect registrars' business processes as well as 
their technical implementations

A two factor authentication for communication between registrar staff and the 
registry makes sense at one level, but Verisign's proposal would appear to go 
too far.

Registry Lock Service - this proposal has merit, but the pricing of the service 
needs to be clarified.

As the SSAC and others have noted during the most recent ICANN public meeting 
(and elsewhere) there are serious issues that affect registrants with regard to 
domain abuse etc.,

However it is imperative that ICANN do NOT allow a private company, such as 
Verisign, to mandate the pricing of such an offering.

The pricing and availability of such a service should be subject to the same 
market forces as domain name registration and thus registrants should be able 
to access the service regardless of their economic status. 
The pricing models that Verisign mention in their proposal would apply to 
registrars who would, naturally, add their own margin. The end result of this 
could easily be that "protecting" a domain name could cost several hundred 
dollars per year on top of the registration fees. While this cost may not be an 
issue for multinational corporates even they would feel the impact when they 
need to apply such a service to their domain portfolios. The underlying 
presumption on Versign's part is that a registrant will only need to protect 
one or two domain names with this kind of service, which is obviously not the 
case when you examine any of the larger brand owners.

For the above reasons I would, therefore, urge ICANN to carefully consider the 
impact on the user community as a whole before allowing Verisign to introduce a 
service that would obviously benefit their shareholders more than the end users

Regards

Michele


--
Mr Michele Neylon
Blacknight Solutions
Hosting & Colocation, Brand Protection
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http://blog.blacknight.com/
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