I was on the phone to Ram Mohan at Afilias yesterday - he's the guy who's overseeing
the Challenge of the remaining names.He has asked me to e-mail him the hundreds
of messages I've received from all over the world, citing suspect Sunrise names.
His team are sifting through all these and, presumably, compiling their own lists
from various other kinds of research.
They are also looking very closely at US
Trademark details, even if they are not immediately facially invalid.
He also mentioned
that his team were grateful for the list of worldwide Trademark websites, which were
posted on this forum recently.
Since I have only just started forwarding all my
e-mails and data, and from the gist of what Ram was saying to me, I form the impression
that Afilias are some way from announcing details of who is going to be challenged.
The request for my information, for example, was only e-mailed to me yesterday.
It
appears that a certain amount of scrutiny is being put into this process (why not,
of course, since Afilias and registrars stand to gain by it) but I remain sceptical
about the likelihood of uncovering many foreign or "veiled" US applications. I also
remain totally sceptical of any "special deal" for "Landrush 1 pre-registration customers".
I would say that is completely off the cards, except on an individual registrar basis,
if you get a particularly scrupulous registrar like RegistrationTek who said they
would honour the place in the queue of Landrush pre-registrants.
Anyway, the fact
remains that all this research into fakes could easily have been carried out in this
way, if the Domebase solution had been implemented, and that would have safeguarded
the investment of time and money made by the original Landrush customers.
The Domebase
solution would have protected everyone except the Sunrise Frauds... Afilias has never
explained why it would not implement it.
Nor has it explained why its executives
were allowed to profit from submitting over half the frauds themselves, or why facially
invalid applications (including Govinda Leopold's) were not simply deleted in time
for the Landrush.