ICANN announced this week, the opening of the comment period for the “Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery Working Group”, seeking opinions certain matters from the registrant point of view, but failed to follow its own staff recommendation that it should address warehousing by registrars.
What ICANN called for comments on this week were:
“””Whether adequate opportunity exists for registrants to redeem their expired domain names;
Whether expiration-related provisions in typical registration agreements are clear and conspicuous enough;
Whether adequate notice exists to alert registrants of upcoming expiration’s;
Whether additional measures need to be implemented to indicate that once a domain name enters the Auto-Renew Grace Period, it has expired (e.g., hold status, a notice on the site with a link to information on how to renew, or other options to be determined);
Whether to allow the transfer of a domain name during the Redemption Grace Period (RGP).””””
However for me the big news isn’t what ICANN is asking for opinions on, but what it seemingly missed in this discussion, which is what should a registrar do with an expired domain.
We have long talked about the mess that ICANN has allowed to occur with expired domains, by not setting any policy whatsoever as to what registrars should do with an expired domain.
Due to the failure of ICANN to have a uniform rules on expired domains, registrars currently can do anything they want with an expired domain.
Many registrars drop them exclusively to an auction service like NameJet.com, or SnapNames.com, where expired domains are auctioned off to the high bidder with the registrar sharing in the revenue generated by the expired domain sale.
Godaddy.com has its own auction site where it auctions off its customers expired domains and keeps the revenue generated by the sales.
Other registrars simply keep the domain for themselves or sell them as premium domains through their own site.
Other registrars simply let the domain expire and drop back into the pool of available domains.
ICANN last October, in its report on the comments it received for the revised contract with its registrars noted:
“A total of 29 distinct submissions were received”…..Eighteen of the comments solely expressed objections to registrars “warehousing” domain names upon expiration and made no other observations or comments about proposed changes to the RAA”
Our comments were one of these 18.
They went on to conclude in that report that “warehousing should be addressed”.
However, in the 10 months that has passed, since ICANN’s own staff recommended that “Warehousing should be addressed”, it has not.
This comment period and review of the “Expired Domain Policy” would seem the perfect time for ICANN to finally review this wild, wild west situation it has allowed and finally pass uniform rules on what registrars should and should not be allowed to do with its customers expired domains, but despite the fact that they promised they would review the issue, they missed this prime opportunity to do so.
Posted under Domain Parking, Domain Registrars, Domain Sales, Domain Services
This post was written by Andrew on August 25, 2009
Scott Smith,is one of the people who helped organize the first TelCamp.Moreover,he and Mark Kolb and Freaky Steve realized telcamp.tel .
The American Automobile Association,known as AAA,is a 50 million member North American not-for-profit automobile lobby group, service organization, and seller of vehicle insurance.
Richard Gabriel has just closed the $1.5 million sale of DropShippers.com to Tom Hashem of Scranton, Pennyslvania.
The Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery Working Group that was launched following the adoption of its charter by the GNSO Council on 24 June 2009 is requesting people input to inform its deliberations to answer many questions.