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Information Technology News ICANN promises to tighten up domain name administration
Information Technology News ICANN promises to tighten up domain name administration | ICANN promises to tighten up domain name administration |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Tuesday, 26 June 2007 | |
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ICANN president and CEO, Dr Paul Twomey, said: "The results of that review are driving this workshop. We are going to keep this discussion going, get input from the wider community, and then we will make the changes needed to protect registrants and domain names." He added: "When ICANN introduced competition to the domain name market in 1998, there was one registrar. Today there are more than 890 – so it's obvious that a lot has changed since the first Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) was introduced in a much smaller and radically different marketplace. We also learned valuable lessons from the RegisterFly situation and ICANN is turning those lessons into plans and policies to protect registrants and their domain names." RegisterFly was a US based registrar for approximately 2,000,000 domain names held by about 900,000 customers. Notable clients of RegisterFly included the government of Thailand, the Easter Seals charity and pop star Michael Jackson. In 2007 ICANN launched an investigation of RegisterFly amid allegations of fraud. Details of the whole sorry saga, which is still unfolding, can be found on Wikipedia. One change to the RAA being looked at is introducing graduated enforcement tools. According to Twomey, "Right now, ICANN's only tool is to terminate accreditation – a step that has been avoided in the past for anything other than flagrant, repeated failures to cure material breaches of the RAA, because termination is viewed as an extreme remedy, with negative consequences to registrants. A graduated sanctions scheme based on the nature and seriousness of alleged breaches will give ICANN more tools to effectively enforce the agreements." At present ICANN has no contractual relationship with resellers of domain names and cannot directly address consumer complaints about reseller practices. It is discussing changing the RAA so that registrars have specific responsibilities with regard to their relationships with resellers. Other topics discussed in the workshop included: - the implementation of the registrar data escrow program for generic top-level domains by the end of 2007; - development of registry failover plan, which lays out ICANN's response plan if a registry suffers a financial, technical or business failure, or is prevented from operating by outside factors like a natural disaster; - recent work done by ICANN's Contractual Compliance function.{moscomment}
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