REVISED DOMEBASE PROPOSAL (8/31/2001)1. Hold "Land
Rush I" as originally scheduled.
2. Registrars do not submit names in "Land Rush
I" that are registered in the Sunrise Period.
3. After Land Rush I, registrars
give their customers the option to:
(a) cancel name not submitted in Land Rush
I and receive any applicable refund... none, partial or complete, depending on registrar-specific
agreement; or
(b) have name submitted in Land Rush II held after the end of the
Sunrise Challenge period without additional cost.
4. All names registered in the
Sunrise Period are entered into Land Rush II.
5. In addition to people with names
postponed from Land Rush I, new people can pre-register names in Land Rush II.
Registrars who accepted "only one submission per name" for Land Rush I must keep
that policy for Land Rush II to avoid "bait and switch" for Land Rush I pre-registrants.
6.
The "winner" of a name for Land Rush II: (a) gets that name for a registration fee
if the name has been successfully Sunrise challenged* by Afilias or someone else
and not taken by someone with legitimate trademark rights; (b) gets that name for
a registration fee if it has been voluntarily canceled by the Sunrise registrant;
or (c) can Sunrise challenge* the name and get it if successful (the name is not
trademarked) for a subsidized fee (between $0 and $295) without having to show a
trademark right in the name (which would be impossible by definition). In this
manner, legitimate trademark holders would not lose any names in Land Rush II, but
sunrise squatters on non-trademarked names would face challenge by either Afilias
or the Land Rush II winner.
*to protect legitimate trademark holders from name
loss due to WHOIS data processing corruption (good data entered, bad data displayed),
give original registrant a specified time-window after challenge to demonstrate that
the registrant holds legitimate trademark for the name in accordance with Sunrise
rules despite corrupted WHOIS data.
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I
welcome your feedback. Some of my own comments.
If you want to eliminate
Sunrise or want to set up a separate TLD extension for trademarks, then I can understand
how you would not support this... although the honest Land Rush folks will be the
sacrificial lamb to achieve this policy objective.
If you want to ensure that registrars
do not register any names for themselves, then you would view this as not going far
enough. Please see my earlier post about how complex this is... ethically,
technically, and politically. Based on my empirical analysis of over 11,000
names, it looks to me like the sunrise squatter issue is an
order of mangnitude
larger than registrar reserved issue... and much clearer ethically, contractually,
politically, and technically. If you really want to pursue this, then please
either: pursue yourself; or tackle the issues I raised to convince me and others
that this can/should be tackled here. I, for one, do not feel smart enough
or
politically powerful enough to solve this one at this time.
Personally, I
think that this proposal is pareto optimal (makes everyone either better off or neutral)
for Afilias, ICANN, registrars, Land Rush preregistrants, IPC and TM lawyers, and
general public... everyone except sunrise squatters who have snatched .INFO names
with bogus trademark information. Time is running out for constructive action.
The current course is not a good one.