[registrars] Relevant Legal Decision

["Michael D. Palage" <michael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello All:

The following decision from the US Federal 4th Circuit involving NSI should
be of interest to many on this list, see
http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinion.pdf/031226.U.pdf. Although the facts
in this case involve the registration period prior to the introduction of
competitive domain name registration services (i.e. pre-ICANN), how the
court addressed the binding nature of online contracts when services are
provided through intermediaries is worth the read.

Speaking as an armchair lawyer here is what I would be checking on over the
upcoming months. I believe Virginia has a five year statute of limitation
for breech of contract claims. During the late 90's prior to the creation of
ICANN and the introduction of competitive registrar services, a lot of
domain names (in the millions) were registered but never paid for. In fact
this practice was prohibited in the actual ICANN Registrar Accreditation
Agreement in an effort to stem abusive registrations, see Paragraph 3.7.4 of
the accreditation agreement -  "Registrar shall not activate any Registered
Name unless and until it is satisfied that it has received a reasonable
assurance of payment of its registration fee." Will anyone at NSI be
spending some time digging through old records to see if there are any old
customers that engaged in a similar business practice and which are *not*
judgment proof. It was just the lawyer in me that had to ask this question
:-)

Happy holidays,

Michael D. Palage