North American Network Operators Group
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Re: what problem are we solving? (was Re: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs)

  • From: David Conrad
  • Date: Sat Jun 28 08:50:02 2008
On Jun 27, 2008, at 8:59 PM, WWWhatsup wrote:
David Conrad wrote: 
With that said, personally, I agree that more attention should be
spent on the welfare of the registrants.  Unfortunately, given I work
for ICANN, my providing comments in the RAA public consultation along
those lines would be a bit ... awkward.

Would you agree with Danny Younger (I believe this is his position) then that there should be a
properly constituted & recognized registrants constituency?


Obviously speaking personally, conceptually I agree, but the challenge here has always been how do you "properly constitute and recognize registrants" in a way that doesn't allow for capture. For example, you could say 'only folks who have domain names can be part of that constituency', but in reality, the majority of domain names are held by registrars. You could add the restriction that 'registrants' must be natural persons, but how would one verify this across the entire planet? It obviously isn't impossible, but people already complain about how big ICANN is -- I can't see how having some mechanism to validate a registrant constituency won't make ICANN _much_ larger...

However, lacking this, I personally believe there should be strong explicit registrant protections built into the RAA. But that's just me.

Regards,
-drc