[ga] Grandfathering of SnapBacks vs other systems, and other comments

[George Kirikos <gkirikos@yahoo.com>]

Hi Marilyn,

If you would forward this message to the Task Force mailing list, that
would be great.

In regards to SnapNames' document with regards to Grandfathering, they
slipped in a very misleading and inaccurate point with regards to
tortious interference of contracts, and I quote:

"no other customers—lacking pre-paid contracts today—have even a prayer
of that kind of claim."

The key word that was slipped in was "pre-paid". An agreement does NOT
require prepayment to be considered a contract -- all that is required
is consideration (amongst all the other elements that constitute a
contract). A promise to pay later, on a contingent basis, is valid
consideration and still constitutes a binding contract. With regards to
business models such as NameWinner, where payment is only received upon
successful registration of a name, those are valid binding contracts.
The addition of "prepaid" doesn't mean that non-prepaid contracts are
any less important or valid, although the attempt has been made to
imply that.

Services that would be impacted by WLS should be permitted the ability
to produce a list of names they wish to be excluded, before WLS is
implemented (they need not produce those lists in advance of ICANN's
decision to Verisign or SnapNames)

Furthermore, it is misleading to suggest that the affected names with
SnapBacks would not be grandfathered into WLS. These are sophisticated
players, who know how to game a system. They can manually remove their
SnapBack at a pre-specified time, thus having certain knowledge that a
WLS slot will become available. That knowledge is inside information,
that is not accessible to all. They would then hammer the WLS system
for that particular name, to achieve the WLS slot using that inside
information. This would thus allow sophisticated players to transfer
their SnapBack slots into WLS slots. Sophisticated players with
SnapBacks on valuable names would rather have a high chance at getting
a WLS slot using that insider information, rather than competing in the
current level playing field against NameWinner, eNom, and other players
in the Status Quo where there is equal access among registrars to the
registry resources.

With regards to some of the statistics provided by SnapNames, they
should be taken with a grain of salt, clearly. We don't even see a list
of the actual names, and they exclude their own customer base.

Contrast that with the independent analysis of their own "Hot 100"
list, of their best names (since removed from their site):

http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/registrars/Arc01/msg01738.html

I'd also like to bring the Task Force's attention to the opinions of
Slashdot readers when the topic of WLS first came up:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/14/0649205

There was little support for it, and lots of opposition.

Lastly, I'd like to reissue the challenge that was presented in the
teleconference. The wait-list metaphor for apartment rentals was a very
useful analogy brought up by Chuck Gomes of Verisign. I'd like to know
of a single landlord anywhere in the world that charges a deposit for a
rental property ("aka WLS fee") but does not refund that deposit if the
current tenant renews the apartment rental (i.e. domain is renewed).
Only an abusive monopolist like Verisign registry would introduce such
a system, and have the gall to actually suggest it enhances
competition!

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
http://www.kirikos.com/


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