by kierenmccarthy on April 18, 2012
Last week, I received a highly unusual email claiming that an article on my personal website was libellous and insisting I take it down within a week.
Even more unusually, the article was from 2002 – yes nearly a decade ago – it is called “Domain scam merchants get legs sucked by toothless OFT” and it tells how the same man had had his knuckles rapped by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in the UK having been caught trying to sell domains for top-level domains that do not exist. Examples were dot-brit, dot-sex, dot-scot.
The OFT had failed to do anything until the two people at the heart of the story crossed the line in the United States by using 9/11 as a way of advertising “patriotic” dot-usa domains (which also do not exist). The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was not at all amused and got a temporary restraining order against them, even putting out a news release on the matter. There were a series of other news releases as the FTC fought them, winning “as much as $300,000 for consumer redress”. Clearly selling non-existent domain names can be a profitable business done right.
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by kierenmccarthy on January 13, 2012
I wrote an extensive review of the dot-jobs saga earlier this week on .Nxt called: The case study that could kill ICANN.
This afternoon, I saw the Stephane van Gelder had referenced it in a blog post: What ICANN is doing wrong.
I wrote a lengthy response to Stephane’s post, but for some reason it repeatedly could not get past his anti-spam mechanisms. Having spent a little bit of time writing a response, I figured I would post it here instead. It’s below:
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I think you’re being a little unfair to me. It is relatively easy to follow the article, even though the process itself was a little convoluted.
But anyway, this is the real problem: a very large number of people now know exactly what has happened and how bad it is. But what will happen? How will anyone be held to account? Will anyone even admit publicly that this is an example of poor governance?
Even if you were to raise it as GNSO Chair at the next ICANN meeting, you would likely be shouted down or told it is not in the GNSO’s remit, or be put under enormous peer pressure to keep it out of the public sphere. You’d probably be offered a private briefing. Anything to prevent the taboo being broken.
The best anyone can expect is that some Board members will dig into the issue.
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Summary/analysis of dot-xxx issue
May 18, 2010I have spent the past week going through literally thousands of comments about whether there should be a new dot-xxx Internet extension for pornography. You won’t be surprised to hear it has brought out some strong feelings.
Anyway, the company behind the application, ICM Registry, hired me to write an objective summary of what was said. [...]