[ga] Pooling .eu registrations for auction

["Richard Henderson" <richardhenderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Copy of EURid's response to my initial enquiry, and my follow up questions:

Dear EURid team,

First of all, thank you very much for the courtesy of your detailed reply. If I am correct in my understanding of what you have told me:
1. Pool.com are not yet accredited and if this remains the case they are not allowed to offer any services.
2. The individual registrar has to submit a domain application, and it has to be on a first-come first-serve basis. If the registrar (who must be accredited) is successful in acquiring the domain name, he/she may not re-sell the domain name (for example, to another registrar).

I feel that some further clarification may be needed, however.

Question 1: Pool.com simply attracts interest in .eu names and passes the names of interested applicants to one of its EU-accredited registrars. In this sense, Pool.com would not exactly be offering the service themselves. They would be saying, "You can contact us, and we will make sure that your application is passed on to one of our registrars to legitimately carry out. Would this be acceptable to EURid?

Question 2: I understand the model Pool.com offers is that many people may contact POOL for the same .eu domain name. They will attempt to legitimately acquire this domain name through various registrars who work for them. In the event of this being a popular domain name which various people have asked POOL to acquire for them, there will then be an auction with the name going to the highest bidder. Will this process be acceptable to EURid?

Question 3: I understand that Pool.com may charge $60 for each name one of their supporting registrars acquire for the people who contacted POOL (unless an auction pushes the price higher). Would EURid consider that Pool.com are entitled to act as 'agent' for these registrars, and charge the winning applicant $60?

Question 4: When you say that (without accreditation) Pool.com "are not allowed to offer any services", does this extend to acting as the point of contact for .eu domain applicants, where these applications will then be dispersed to legitimate and accredited registrars working to catch domains for Pool?

Question 5: Would any similar restrictions apply equally to companies like Snapnames or Enom, if they use multiple registrars to increase their chances of 'catching' a domain name, and then auction the name to the highest bidder?

Question 6: You say that no reselling of domain names will be allowed. Do you mean just during the launch process? How will you stop this and enforce this? Or do you mean no reselling ever? You will be aware that it is an industry norm that domains may be freely traded, bought and sold, through all the major TLDs? Surely you are not proposing to break this norm, and how would you enforce such a rule, given that all the original registrant has to do is change the nameservers and contact email, and another person would have control of a domain name anyway?

These questions are in no sense meant to be critical. I am just respectfully asking for clarification, so that the process is clear, so that rules can be clearcut and upheld, and so that I (and other consumers) do not lose money through EURid interventions or confiscated domains.

The last thing you want is for the launch to come crashing down (as the .info launch did 3 years ago) and therefore it is very important that EURid anticipate as many potential 'gaps' in their processes as possible, and intervene in advance. Experience in recent years has shown that various registrars will attempt all kinds of methods to circumvent the established rules in order to gain an advantage in the process.

For example, will your release of domains favour a registrar who submits just 10 names for a favoured customer, as opposed to another registrar who submits 2000 names for its general clientele? In this case, would the registrar with a small number of applications gain any advantage? (This happened in the .info LR2 names release and also the .biz names release.

And then, if one registrar just operates in its own right as a single registrar, and another company has created 100 'shell' registrars or even 40, will that mean that the company who has exploited the technicality of having multiple accredited registrar 'shells' will in effect *swamp* the applications of the ordinary registrar who operates in good faith as a single accredited entity?

My advice is that, at the very least, the distribution of names should be built around a structure which includes "blank rounds" for any registrar with a short list of applications. In other words, to make the distribution fair, if an ordinary registrar submits say 1000 applications, and another registrar submits just 10 applications, I propose that 990 'blank' rounds should be added to the registrar applying for only 10, so that they don't just grab 10 best names in the first 10 rounds of names being released. Or are you going to simply let any registrar fight it out real-time, in which case you will be inundated by people running scripts via all their 'shell' registrars in order to grab the best domains.

Surely a controlled and orderly names release must ensure fair distribution of domain names, and also attempt to prevent exploitation of the system by 3 or 4 companies with multiple accredited registrars, otherwise all the registrars who simply apply as single registrars may find their provisions for their customers have been compromised.

Just a few thoughts, but I'd be very grateful if you could consider answers to my 6 Questions at the top of this mail. As usual, I will forward this correspondence to various ICANN Directors, the ICANN Registry and Registrar Liaison Managers, and representatives of the At Large internet users groups.

Thank You. I appreciate your response and willingness to engage in dialogue.

With kind regards,
Richard Henderson
www.atlarge.org

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "EURid" <info@xxxxxxxx>
To: "Richard Henderson" <richardhenderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2005 3:47 PM
Subject: Re: Pooling .eu registrations for auction


> Dear Sir,
> 
> Thank you very much for your email and your commitment to .eu.
> 
> Article 5 of the 874/2004 of the European Commission, laying down public policy rules concerning the implementation and functions of the .eu Top Level Domain and the principles governing registration, states:
> 
> "A registrar who receives more than one registration request for the same name shall forward those requests to the Registry in the chronological order in which they were received. Only applications received after the date of accreditation shall be forwarded to the Registry".
> 
> This means that only accredited registrars may accept pre-registrations, they may only accept pre-registrations after they got accredited and they may only do so in a first-come-first-served order. Not complying with this provision would be a violation of the EC regulation and above all a breach of the registrar agreement.
> 
> Equally, we would like to refer to Art. 4 of above mentioned EC regulation, which states that "Only registrars accredited by the Registry shall be permitted to offer registration services for names under the .eu TLD."  Registrars offering these services without being accredited are violating the EC regulation. In addition, no reselling of domain names will be allowed. Only the accredited registrar can offer domain names to the public. Reselling domain names to other registrars would constitute a breach of the registrar agreement.
> 
> Regarding pool.com, we would like to point out that at the moment, pool.com has not yet filed an application to become an accredited registrar. If they are not accredited, then they are not allowed to offer any services, as laid out in Article 4 of EC regulation 874/2004.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Your EURid team
> 
> 
>