So, the Afilias accredited registrars and their affiliates made a couple of million
USDs out of bona fide .info Sunrise and Landrush applicants who had their preregistration
fees for 10,000 .info names blown away by the Sunrise cyber squatting stampede made
possible by Afilias's "after the event" IP protection/anti-cyberfraud policy, and
Afilias made more than twice as much revenue registering the applications of TM cheats
than it would have registering the same names to Landrush applicants, but what of
the costs? Surely the events of the Afilias .info launch has caused everyone involved
in the sad saga to question the integrity of the current Afilias executive and the
company's technological capability to operate a new registry.
Thousands of .info
preregistrants I would guess have no confidence that the current Afilias executive
will deal with them fairly in future, after the way they have been treated during
the .info launch.
Given its role in the Afilias .info launch debarcle, I will also
propose that the same .info preregistrants hold the current executive of the supposed
DNS watchdog ICANN in contempt, believing them to be nothing more than a domain industry
lobby group rather than the protector of the public good and a sustainable Internet,
as is their charter.
I think it is likely that without intervention, the resale
of the 10,000 Sunrise names currently being challenged will provide Afilias with
an opportunity to disappoint and alienate a new cohort of domain buyers, while Afilias
provides the media with fanfare and spin doctoring, if of course, after the event,
Afilias deigns to communicate to anyone at all.
The .info launch and I believe
the .biz launch have brought their respective registries and the industry regulatory
authority into disrepute.
It appears to me that the .biz and .info launches
have demonstrated it is time for some real regulation of the domain business, in
order to safe guard the public.
To leave the DNS unregulated and to let operators
of the likes of Afilias and many of its accredited registrars and affiliates to continue
to do business as they have to date in the .info launch, will only heighten further
the public's growing awareness of the risks of doing business with domain sellers.
May
be it has taken the launches of the first new TLDs to bring into focus the urgent
need to shake-up ICANN, in order to make it do the job planned for it - namely the
stewardship of the Internet for the benefit of the broad Internet community.
I
am quite certain that the Afilias executive has learned nothing from the public backlash
in response to the events of the .info launch, given the "take the money and stuff
the customer" culture which seems to permeate the domain business from top to bottom.
My guess is that the resale of the the 10,000 challenged names will be contrived
to maximise Afilias and its associates' profits, while making winning one of the
resale names as difficult as possible for domain buyers.
I think it is too late
for any other scenario.
If events unfold as I imagine, it will be conformation
of the need for rapid intervention by the Department of Commerce and the US Congress.
Without
the introduction of some checks and balances into ICANN, in the form of new executive
members representing the interests of the public, nothing is likely to change the
culture which saw the selection of Afilias as the .info Registry, the abomination
of the .info launch and the excesses of some of the Afilias accredited registrars
and affiliates.
Unless lessons are learned from the events of the recent new TLD
launches and changes made to protect the public from the types of practices which
characterised the launches, then everyone has been a loser.