[ga] Research: .NAME Registrations Not Conforming to .NAME Registration Restrictions

["Ben Edelman" <edelman@law.harvard.edu>]

GA members have previously offered a variety of comments on charters, uses,
and allegations of impermissible registrations in new TLDs.  In this
context, I thought GA readers might be interested in my new ".NAME
Registrations Not Conforming to .NAME Registration Restrictions."

In this research, I document nearly 6000 .NAME domain names that seem not to
conform to .NAME's registration restrictions.  Contrary to .NAME's registry
agreement (with ICANN) and registration agreement (with registrants, via
registrars), each name in my listings is seemingly not the name or pseudonym
of any individual.  Instead, these names serve a variety of different
functions -- names of companies (sharper.image.name), organizations
(harvard.university.name), products (allergy.tylenolallergysinus.name), and
geographic locations (stateof.california.name), for example, along with a
variety of names related to sexually-explicit content and domain name
registration.   These many nonconforming registrations, constituting more
than 8% of currently-registered .NAME domains, call into question the
effectiveness of enforcement of .NAME registration restrictions.

I've tabulated the names alphabetically, by registrant (for those
registrants with the most registrations), and by registrar.  At the
suggestion of readers of my previous work, I've also made it easier to find
the specific domains registered, for example, by a given registrar.

My work is available at:
  <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/name-restrictions/>.


I'm currently beginning what I expect will be a several-month project of
quantitatively evaluating and documenting all new TLDs.  I welcome
suggestions from GA members as to important focus areas for my research.


Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/edelman

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