[ga] .Travel and the need to stop "leasing"

["Richard Henderson" <richardhenderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The new .travel agreement highlights the problems of ICANN's contracts and specifically the problem of "leasing" which has been created by the recent EnCirca/RegistryPro actions.

According to the .travel Agreement, this restricted TLD (sTLD) will limit registration to: people, businesses, organizations and entities, however constituted, whose primary area of activity is in the travel industry. Registrants will have to submit authentication data, and this data will be verified by what the Agreement calls an "Authentication Provider".

Once a registrant has been authenticated, there will be no limit on the number of domains he/she may register.

The trouble is, this is .Pro all over again. Suppose I happen to be a taxi driver or I sometimes take paying visitors in my house, and I want to make some extra money. What is to stop me "doing an EnCirca" and "leasing" 5000 generic names to non-authorised customers all over the world? I would remain the "Registrant" and I am authorised, but using the precedent set by RegistryPro (and to date not challenged by ICANN) I can lease all these names to what you might call pseudo-registrants who simply want to turn .travel into yet another gTLD.

ICANN needs to intervene, to stop "leasing" as a cover for registration to totally unauthenticated customers, otherwise .Pro and .Travel will simply become gTLDs open to everyone.

Yrs,

Richard Henderson