it would provide increased competition, I shook my head and wondered what Australia
had done to deserve an extension administered by the registry which orchestrated
the Internet's worst instance of cyber fraud during its .info launch and in all likelihood
will continue to ignore all but its corporate customers when 10,000 challenged (does
any one believe that all fraudulently registered Sunrise names will be challenged!)names
are effectively sold for a third time at Landrush (ha ha) 2.Who would like to
guess the way in which Afilias will contrive the resale of the challenged names in
order to take most money out of the pockets/credit card accounts of the Internet
community?
You can bet it will either be a low key affair where insiders with the
best technology will grab the best of the recycled names, or, amid much fanfare,
Afilias and its complicit registrars and shop fronts will tout the opportunity to
register names, thought so good that some risked the severe penalties for TM fraud
to register them in the .info Sunrise, as though it was only through Afilias's diligence
that the opportunity of a lifetime is being made possible.
Posters will know -
although not many of the people who will be attracted to the likely hoopla that will
preceed the resale of the Sunrise registration frauds - that the availability of
10,000 .info names is due to Afilias contrivance to make more money, or lack of diligence
on Afilias's part.
It beggars belief that the concern expressed by Afilias
Ltd. in its .info Registry bid document about the obvious risks of TM and cyber fraud
and its claim that it would be proactive in its security measures to protect IP rights,
could result in ICANN approval of an "after the event" policy on TM and cyber fraud
in the ICANN/Afilias Registry Agreement, unless ICANN and Afilias wanted to find
out how many applicants would try to cheat, and how much additional revenue could
be made from an obviously inadequate launch policy.
It seems to me that to increase
the incidence of cyber fraud, the entrepreneurial SpyProductions (and we have been
advised UKReg) notified any one whom had had contact with it that the down side risks
of committing TM fraud to secure a .info Sunrise registration were minimal.
SpyProductions told us all how hard it would be to win a valuable name in the Landrush
- so why not cheat - the system was designed for cheats - as Afilias's only IP rights
protection was an "after the event" policy.
Unfortunately, for every cheat prepared
to pay five years registration for a .info Sunrise registration, heaven knows how
many people with preregistrations for the same name had the money they had paid for
their chance to win the name wiped away.
It's hard to guess the size of the windfall
the registrars enjoyed when the cheats took 10,000 of the 50,000 Sunrise registrations.
In
my case, preregistering education generics, I had bought about ten preregistrations
for each of the top ten names I wanted by the time of the SpyProductions announcement,
after which I stopped buying preregistrations. As all of my top ten names were
taken with fraudulent TM applicants - I had the cost of 100 preregistrations go up
in smoke.
Multiply this amount of money by the number of Landrush applicants who
wanted these same names, who may have spent as much if not more than me.
My guess
is that for just the top ten names on my list, there was probably 50 other applicants
who had preregistered them in the months before Sunrise to the level that I had.
To try to gauge the size of the windfall to the Afilias Ltd. registrars, do the
sums for just one group of generics in what must be a list of more than 100 - (100
preregistrations X 50 applicants = 5,000 preregistration fee payments).
Do the
sums for say 100 groups of generics - (5,000 X 100 = 500,000 preregistration fee
payments).
With the ICANN approved Afilias "after the event" IP protection policy,
the registry Afilias and its registrars derived 10,000 registrations X 5 years fees
= 50,000 registration years, compared to 10,000 X 2 = 20,000 registration years,
a difference of 30,000 registration years, while the registrars absorbed I estimate
500,000 preregistration fees for the same names, and will still have the 10,000 names
registered by Afilias for the Sunrise cheats available for resale in the comming
months.
In my opinion, given Afilias's track record with the .info rollout, Afilias
should be excluded from consideration for additional Internet responsibilities, until
those in the company responsible for the .info Sunrise fiasco are replaced with others
prepared to be responsible, accountable and transparent.
Why, when given what we
know of Afilias's performance as the administrator of the .info Registry, would the
Internet's regulatory authority ICANN appoint Afilias to administer the Australian
extension.
If Afilias didn't win the job on merit, how did it get the job?