[ga] For the Attention of Nancy Victory - ICANN open and responsive?

["Richard Henderson" <richardhenderson@ntlworld.com>]

Title: Help

This e-mail was sent on 12th May days to Dan Halloran, the ICANN Registrar Liaison executive, raising serious concerns and questions, and requesting a response. 68 days later he has still not even acknowledged my mail (and repeated copies of it). The mail and its questions have been highly publicised on ICANN's own forums and mailing lists, but no response to the serious issues raised has been offered. Some of the issues concerned problems of abuse facing the .info LR2 in the light of registrar practice in the .biz2B in April. It is now to late to address that problem, and the warnings were vindicated, with a repeat of the same problems in last week's .info name distribution. Other issues concern the way ICANN accredits registrars and implements its Agreements with Registries and Registrars. These are fair-minded, serious and legitimate questions.

 

In the light of Nancy Victory's letter to Stuart Lynn this week, calling for indication of ICANN's promises of more openness and transparency, I find it bizarre if a respectable member of the ICANN at-large community and British society can be treated in this high-handed manner, with a total lack of responsiveness and an evasion of awkward questions. I believe that Dan Halloran has demonstrated for Nancy Victory the shallow words and hollow commitment that ICANN has to any real openness and transparency. In the context of diminishing accountable representation, and scepticism from governments around the world (note, for example, the unusually critical tone adopted by GAC at Bucharest), I question whether DoC can continue its relationship with ICANN without a wide review of the MoU.

 

Would Dan Halloran please answer my questions?

 

Would ICANN please engage in open dialogue and respond?

 

I have been waiting 68 days for Mr Halloran to acknowledge my mail.

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Open Letter to Dan Halloran.

 

Dan

 

I've just been reading the ICANN Advisory concerning WHOIS data accuracy,

as published at: http://www.icann.org/announcements/advisory-10may02.htm

 

I'd be grateful if you could respond to me and the community, with answers

to the following questions:

 

1. It appears that Yesnic submitted at least 269 applications in the .info

Sunrise process, which were duly registered on the basis of the Trademark

information which they submitted. Subsequently around 200 of these have

been successfully challenged by Afilias and made available in their second

landrush.

 

(a) What steps has ICANN taken to find out whether Yesnic submitted false

Trademark data?

 

(b) If Yesnic is shown to have submitted false data, does ICANN recognise a

responsibility to the general public to call into question their accreditation,

since ICANN accreditation is supposed to signal to the public that a Registrar

is endorsed by ICANN and the accreditation of other registrars would lose its

value if discredited by any registrar who had breached the public trust?

 

(c) If ICANN has not yet ascertained all the facts, will you undertake to carry

out an investigation and report back to the community on your findings in an

open and transparent manner, since public trust in ICANN-accredited registrars

is a very important matter?

 

2. It appears that DomainBank breached the Registry/Registrar rules in the

submission of 93 .info Sunrise names on behalf of William Lorenz of Strategic

Domains. This case has been widely publicised and previously reported to

ICANN on several occasions. The Registry/Registrar rules stipulate that to

sponsor a Sunrise name, registrars had to ensure that four data fields were

properly entered: Trademark Name; Trademark Number; Trademark Country;

Trademark Date. DomainBank submitted 93 names which lacked information

in ALL FOUR of these datafields.

 

(a) Given Hal Lubsen's association both with DomainBank AND with Afilias

(as its CEO), can ICANN please confirm that the Afilias rules were indeed

abused in this case? This is a matter which concerns the public because of

demonstrable conflict of interest (in that these visibly ineligible applications

were registered on spurious grounds - to the benefit of both DomainBank and

Afilias, with both of which Mr Lubsen was closely associated). It is also a

matter of public concern, because if even the Afilias CEO's registrar

company was abusing the Afilias rules and submitting invalid WHOIS data,

what trust can there be in any ICANN Registry or Accredited Registrar?

 

(b) Will ICANN please state what censure, actions or sanctions have / or

will be taken against the parties involved? Please bear in mind that

consumers lost money, because many ICANN-accredited registrars

charged non-refundable fees to pre-register names in anticipation of

the .info Landrush. When DomainBank sponsored these 93 names in

the .info Sunrise, customers (including myself) lost the chance of obtaining

some of these specific names in the Landrush - a product we had paid for.

This loss may well have been replicated over 100,000 times in the .info

Sunrise fiasco.

 

(c) If ICANN has not yet investigated this serious case, will you undertake

to report back on your findings and inform me and the community of your

findings and actions - in an open and transparent manner?

 

3. In the case of Spy Productions, which is a well-documented case where

the registrar admitted he filled in fake Trademark data in the .info Sunrise to

give his customers a chance, I note that ICANN holds the sponsoring

Registrar responsible for accurate information, not the reseller. From your

advisory: "The registrar obligations outlined above (as well as all other

registrar obligations under the RAA) apply with equal force to all

registrations sponsored by a registrar in any TLD for which it is accredited

by ICANN, whether those  registrations were placed directly with the registrar

or through some agent or reseller. In other words,  registrars are responsible

for providing Whois data (and correcting any reported inaccuracies in that data)

for all names under their sponsorship, including the data pertaining to

customers of their resellers."

 

(a) Please could you confirm whether ICANN has investigated this

well-publicised case of WHOIS abuse?

 

(b) Has either Tucows or ICANN taken any action in response to these events,

to protect the broad internet public?

 

(c) Does ICANN have a mechanism for "shutting down" resellers, for example

by requiring defined standards from ICANN's own accredited Registrars?

 

(d) Would ICANN consider removing Tucows accreditation if they failed to police

their own resellers (as appears to have happened in this instance)?

 

4. It appears that in the .biz Group 2B names release, Signature Domains

gained a strong advantage over other consumers and the general public, by

submitting a very short list of applications on behalf of one of their own

partners (Mr Joshua Blacker). ICANN has remained silent on this matter, and

Signature Domains remains an ICANN-accredited registrar. Only ten names

were registered (for Mr Blacker) and no-one else got any (probably because

this was an exclusive list not available for the public).

 

(a) Will ICANN take action BEFORE .info LR2 to make sure that Registrars

do not 'game' the system by submitting exclusive lists like these? This is a

matter which goes beyond Neulevel or Afilias, because it requires revisions

of the Agreements already in place, and because ICANN should not be

content to preside over processes which break their requirement of the public

having fair and unprejudiced access to domain names.

 

(b) Will you please inform me and the community what action will be taken

by Neulevel (initially) and ICANN (with reference to accreditation) in the case

of Signature Domains - if it is found that they broke any Agreements or ICANN

rules? At the heart of this is a profound public concern that registrars should

NOT simply exist for their own benefit. In the case of Signature Domains and

the .biz 2B, this is exactly the concern that has been generated.

 

(c) What is the general policy of ICANN with regard to removing

ICANN-accreditation? (If a registrar fulfils the technical requirements for

accreditation, does that mean that they can breach agreements and rules with

impunity, at the expense of the general public - and does ICANN acknowledge a

responsibility to the public to make sure that if they accredit registrars, those

registrars maintain certain standards?)

 

5. Finally, given the fact that the worst elements of the registrar community

might prove incapable of regulating themselves (and many people would say

this was pretty self-evident) is it not in the interests of the consumer and the

internet public for ICANN to make its "Best Practices for Registrars" into

"Mandatory Practices for Registrars" upon which their accreditation depends?

 

Dan, thank you for the time you may give to these questions, which I believe

deserve to be taken seriously and answered openly and in detail, part by part.

I would be grateful if you could respond in any correspondence in open form,

as I may want to refer to your comments in part or in whole on one or several

ICANN mailing lists. (This message is copied to the ga-list.)

 

If ICANN deserves to retain its administration of the DNS, it must be based on

the central responsibility of putting the internet public first, and ensuring that

domain names are distributed openly, validly, and fairly.

 

Your advisory on WHOIS touches on areas of responsibility that registrars have.

If such advice (and other ICANN agreements) are just words then they will fail to

protect the public and ICANN will fail in its mission.

 

If such advice (and the other rules of operations for registries and registrars) are

to properly protect the public, then you need to demonstrate that they cannot be

flouted and ignored. What is the point of telling the public that a registrar is

ICANN-accredited, if that accreditation means nothing more than technical

capability and the registrar is allowed to cheat or break rules in a way which

makes the public suffer?

 

Kind regards

 

Richard Henderson

 

12th May 2002