The difference between the pre-registration carried out
through all registrars of CORE and the normal registration service offered through
IOD's is, that IOD started to open its .web registry after being authorized to do
so through the IANA (maybe it was misleading, that I called it "pre-register", too
- in the case of IOD it should only read "register", though).You may say, that
it was wrong from the IANA to authorize IOD to register .web domains, but they did.
So IOD did not pre-register, but register from the beginning on - as they were and
still are the legitimate registrars of .web gtld's. They only didn't get the promised
access to the A-root-servers.
Of course IOD's .web registry was and is open to
everybody, as e.g. .com was through network solutions (Internic), too.
If you state,
that only 5 people have used IOD's .web registation services, it might be the problem
of all others, who did not use them. Maybe they all wanted to wait until IOD received
access to the A-root-servers or maybe they where not interested in .web, as there
still was enough .com available. But everybody could have used IOD's.web registry,
if she/he had wanted to. Therefore it is hard to understand why you think this to
border on criminal.
Instead, I think it could cause serious legal problems, if
those legal owners of .web domains would no longer be respected as such in the future.
By
the way, I have checked 30 names under .web and found 22 different owners, not only
5, ...