[registrars] Meeting Prior to Stockholm

["Michael D. Palage" <michael@palage.com>]

As some of you might recall last year prior to Yokohama, a number of
registrars and representatives from VeriSign registry had a meeting in
Reston, Virginia with representatives from the FBI and the department of
justice to discuss domain name hijacking incidents that were making it into
the news headlines.

I was contacted by an FBI agent last month about trying to build upon the
efforts of last year. What is currently proposed is a multiconstituency
summit in Washington next month (sometime between May 14 and May 22) to
discussion various issues surrounding domain names, i.e. hijacking, transfer
problems, access & use of Whois data, new registries and jurisdictional
issues, registrar/registry policies etc. It appears that the FBI and the
Department of Justice will be participating again this year. I have spoken
with representatives from the Business and IP community and they will be
participating. Representatives from consumer groups have also been contacted
and invited to participate.  This is NOT a constituency sponsored event but
a summit that will have a direct and significant impact on our businesses.

The FBI has already informally discussed this with representatives at
VeriSign and I have had informal discussions with NeuLevel representatives
so that they can provide information about their registry lock-down feature
designed to combat hijacking problems. I have also mention this tentative
event to some of the Afilias and RegistryPro people. Although I will be
contacting each of the new registry operators shortly, if you have ties to a
registry operators please pass this message along.

To improve upon last years event I will be trying to circulate material
prior to the meeting so that the discussion panels could be more informed
and productive. I am preparing some questions that I will be circulating
based upon feedback from the FBI agents.

I believe that this summit could provide an excellent information
gather/dissemination process for the tentative Registrant Bill of Rights
that Erica had posted to the list recently.

I should be finalizing a date and location for this event in the DC area by
the end of this week. Seating to this event will be limited, so I need to
get a head count on those registrars that will be attending.

Mike