At variance to what Afilias said it would do to counter TM fraud and cybersquatting
in its .info registry bid document, ICANN awards the .info registry to the Afilias
consortium with a Registry Agreement which contains none of the IP protection/anti-cybersquatting
measures previously detailed in the Afilias winning bid document.Prior to .info
Sunrise phase, registrars such as UKReg and SpyProductions advise the domain buying
community that Afilias is running an "after the event" IP protection policy and that
the way to win the best .info names is to submit Sunrise applications rather than
Landrush applications.
Some within the domain buying community opt to lodge Sunrise
applications with falsified TM details, some provide no details so that their applications
bear the Sunrise application "sample" data - "example TM - 2040-10-1 - eg12345",
others such as William Lorenz indicated that they held no TMs for the names for which
he was aplying.
It is only at this point that Afilias and its registrars and their
affiliates process these applications into fraudulent registrations.
Without the
complicity of Afilias and ICANN, applications containing false TM data, example data
or statements indicating the ineligibility of the applications such as those of Lorenz
could not have produced fraudulent registrations which resulted in the loss of 10,000
names from the Landrush allocation.
If .info Landrush applicants have a case for
return of the millions of dollars they collectively lost due to the events of the
.info Sunrise, their case must be against the registry Afilias Ltd. and the notional
DNS regulatory authority ICANN, for their is no one else who can be responsible.
On
its performance to date it is apparent that ICANN will do nothing for the Landrushers
as the ethical staff of ICANN are not in positions of authority in these matters.
At
the moment, the interests of the broad general public are being under represented
on the ICANN BoD.
Until the removal of those in ICANN responsible for awarding
the info registry to Afilias and then standing by, deaf, dumb and blind to the events
of the .info Sunrise, and the current imbalance of interests on the ICANN BoD is
addressed, no one should believe that ICANN will change or that the interests of
the broad Internet community will be served.