Thank you ICANN and Afilias for breaking the silence
and setting a policy in motion to address the problem of .info Sunrise registration
fraud. Your extended silence has resulted in a growing frenzy of accusations,
some of which might be allayed by the newly announced policy.Afilias' policy helps
quite a lot. Many domain names will be freed-up by Afilias actions. And
thank you Afilias for accepting this task at Afilias' cost, rather than burdening
the public with the cost and delay of having to file Sunrise challenges on obviously
fraudulent registrations.
But does Afilias' policy go far enough? No.
Not as stated in the ICANN press release. We need more information from Afilias,
and more assurance that the right thing is being done.
Afilias' action will result
in elimination of Sunrise registrations where the trademark was "unknown" or "dumping",
and the trademark date was (will be?) in the year 2040. But will Afilias take
any action relating to other flagrant abusers such as:
Cass Foster
Patrick Nobriga
Stephen Rumney
Spy Productions
(registrar who induced fraud for others)
Gregory Carbonaro
Siegfried Langenbach
YesNIC Co., LTD.
cchawaii.net
(for itself and induced fraud for others)
and others, whose individual domain registrations
appear to comply with the trademark name, nationality, and effective date rules,
but when all their applications are viewed together, and trademark numbers compared
with the online trademark database, become glaringly apparent frauds.
Will Afilias
agree to select ALL Sunrise registrations from its database for registrants who appear
to be involved in fraudulent registration (i.e. select all registrations with same
email address and/or registrant name and/or registrant phone number), and Challenge
the whole group of names if there is sufficient indication of possible fraud?
But
after Afilias does challenge a certain number of fraudulent Sunrise registrations,
there will still be a significant number of "seemingly" legitimate Sunrise .info
domain registrations which we as members of the Public strongly suspect do not have
legitimate trademarks, but which have not been challenged by Afilias. What
remedy will there be for members of the Public (i.e. non-trademark holders)?
Will Afilias provide a remedy through the Sunrise Challenge process for non-trademark
holders? If I am the Priority Challenger against a .info Sunrise domain registration,
but I do not have a trademark myself, may I opt for a remedy such as "Receive Priority
Registration Code for Public (not Sunrise) Domain Registration"? There
is not any such remedy available to non-trademark holders in the presently described
Sunrise Challenge process.
If the Sunrise Challenge Process is not amended, the
only existing alternative for non-trademark holders during the Sunrise Challenge
process will be to join the forces of evil, and upon successfully challenging a fraudulent
registration of a .info domain name, inventing one's own fraudulent trademark to
utilize the priority Sunrise registration code from WIPO/Afilias and place one's
own fraudulent Sunrise registration of the domain name. Is that a good honest solution?
Will
WIPO require that Challengers who intend to file their own Sunrise .info domain registrations
upon successful challenge, pre-authenticate their trademark credentials with WIPO
before being awarded a priority Sunrise registration code? If not, we'll only
be trading one fraud for the next fraud in line, until the 120 day Sunrise Challenge
times out and the domain goes to the lucky bastard.
In conclusion, "Thank You"
again to ICANN and Afilias. And please do advise us further on the completeness
of this action as a meaningful remedy for the interests of Public registrants.