Re: [ga] ICANN Officially Approves .jobs and .travel TLD's

["Richard Henderson" <richardhenderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff's comments here are bang on target:

"we have already seen with .pro, enforcement is not there effectively"
"an analogy might be, spare the rod, spoil the child. No use of the rod in
ICANN's case, who do not have the rod - which means the child,
Registrars/Registries, will be spoiled and run amuck...  So we have seen
with .pro thus far, and will likely see with .jobs, .xxx. .asia, .travel,
and especially with .mail and .tel..."
"will such sTLD's have real meaning? Not likely as we have seen with .pro.
Hence then, market forces need the help of others to provide regulation
and/or legislation: i.e. pre-emptive rules"

Unless some degree of enforcement is applied by ICANN, these sTLD registries
will be defined solely by market forces, with Registrar or Registries
deciding what to do with them. The need for integrity of identity, and
verification, will then become secondary to the ability to sell domains to
anyone. It is not unreasonable to expect pre-emptive Agreements to be
adhered to, *including the intentions of the sTLD and its processes of
verification* and for Registries to administer these TLDs responsibly in
accordance with the purpose, spirit, and intent of the Agreements...

... or face enforcement, or ultimately loss of the Registry when it comes up
for review.

I really have to question the quality of work by whoever takes
responsibility for drafting ICANN's loose and flimsy contracts/agreements.
We have seen, time after time, poor advice or wording resulting in problems
which could have been avoided (such as the Auerbach case, the .info
Sunrise - though that was more a lack of enforcement - and here, the loose
wording of the .pro agreement which has made it possible for a company to
exploit a loophole, even if the Registry still seems to be in defiance of
the stated and well-recognised intentions and purposes of its Agreement,
actually using the verification process to allow unverified people access to
the TLD, when the whole point was to use it for the opposite purpose).

It's staggering. The Registry Agreement makes such clear statements of the
intention of a "restricted" registry using verification for the purposes of
'keeping unchecked people out', and in practical terms RegistryPro have
broken their Agreement by ignoring the clear *intentions* of the Agreement
and its Verification processes, by actually using verification to give
unchecked people access to domain names reserved for specific sets of
professionals. The Agreement, in my opinion, has been broken  - breach of
its clear purposes and intended outcomes, and misuse of its verification
processes to bypass the basic intentions of the Agreement.

So yes, Jeff - and ICANN - we need pre-emptive rules. But they need to be
sharp, enforcing, penalty-related rules which will result in TLDs being
defined by the consensus work of many constituencies... not the whim and
fancy of a single registrar or registry out for a quick buck.

Otherwise no sTLD can be taken seriously, and we may as well abort the whole
project.

Yrs,

Richard H