Re: [ga] lawyers
I speak with my lawyer, who you will remember I said there were some uses for, and ask him if they can stop me from doing that. He says nope. They are restraining free enterprise against a company who now has proven technical capabilities and has enough pre-orders to prove a demand for the product in question. Personally, I think it might just fly. I agree, ICANN is ripe for being at the wrong end of legal actions claiming that ICANN has unfairly and improperly acted as a combination for the purpose of restraining trade, restricting the entry of vendors into the marketplace, establishing minimum prices, and prohibiting new product innovations. There are several possible actions, each with its own class of plaintiffs (I use the word "class" intentionally). The registrars form a class that can claim that they are unfairly deprived of the ability to compete due to the imposition of cross-industry standard terms and conditions as well as the imposition of arbitrary minimum registry fees. The buyers of domain names form a much larger class that can claim that they have had to suffer artifically imposed registry prices (that are passed on via the registrars) and suffer industry-wide terms, such as the privacy-busting whois and the trademark-uber-alles UDRP. The damages in this case could amount to billions of dollars - enough to attract the Lerach kind of class action attorneys. Those who have applied for, or perhaps even those who have thought to apply for, top level domains form yet another class. For example, the 40 or so groups who paid $50,000 apiece to ICANN in 2000 to have their applications put on infinite hold seem to have a lot of common-ground (and since ICANN has strung them along saying that their applications are still pending, I'm not sure that the statute of limitations would bar an action.) And this could happen in virtually any country that has laws that make it unlawful for entities to conspire to limit competition, set prices, constrain product innovation, and to block new entrants from entering the marketplace. Just last month a couple of such actions were filed; I expect there to be more in the future. --karl--
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