Don't count on ICANN for adult supervision

If there any industry that needs a code of ethics, it is domain name registrars.

Let’s face this fact up front: Domain name registrars make a lot of money from people who are less than ethical. They collect fees from customers who are clearly infringing trademarks. The registrars say they don't have much choice. If they take any type of name approval role it may expose them to litigation and charges of censorship. But, still, it's a wonderful thing to make money from both the high and the low roads.

But that’s not what upsets me about this industry.

Searching for a domain name ought to be protected. But what if the registrar is watching over your shoulder, recording those names and locking them up?

Network Solutions recently instituted a policy to automatically reserve a domain name once it has been searched. The intent is to prevent, as Computerworld's Linda Rosencrance described it in a story last month, “front running." This practice is “a tactic in which scammers keep track of domain name searches and then register those domains themselves, hoping to sell them to the original searchers at outlandish prices."

Widely criticized for it, Network Solutions said last month it is reconsidering this policy.

I went to check to see how Network Solutions’ reconsideration effort is going and conducted a search on this made up name: domainnameethics.com. The Network Solutions domain name search engine results tells me that domainnameethics.com is available. Hooray. I then go to another domain site, iwhois.com and check the name. The message I get back: domainnameethics.com is registered until 13-Feb-2009.

But when I put domainnameethics.com in a browser command line a Network Solutions sponsored placeholder page appears, "This Site Is Under Construction and Coming Soon." Well, that’s not true is it? Because once I go back to Network Solutions and put the name in the search window again it tells me: “Congratulations! The following domains are available.”

This brings me back to the issue of ethics in the domain name industry. There are no ethics in the domain name industry. But the domain name industry dearly needs some kind of ethical code because it's not going to be regulated in any meaningful way by the globe trotting Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which also gets a cut of the fees collected from honest and unscrupulous domain name registrations. Like I said, it’s a wonderful system all around.

And where is ICANN? Right now, it’s in New Delhi. The only thing this organization can do reliably is book travel. Here are some recent meeting locations: San Juan, Puerto Rico, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Marrakech, Morocco, and Wellington, New Zealand. It’s a Club Med for Geeks.

This is the press release this week from Paul Twomey, ICANN's President and CEO about the meeting in India: "Today's ceremony recognizes the ICANN community's success in creating a formal, global structure to help ensure ideas and feedback from individual Internet users around the world is heard in our policy processes." [Italics, mine]

Let’s deconstruct Dr. Twomey’s statement. There is no “formal, global structure” – otherwise Network Solutions would not be off the grid with its own domain registration flytrap. And there is no feedback loop. If one registrar can do what it wants, then they can all do what they want. This ought to be a room-service ending four alarm fire for ICANN.

To be fair, ICANN is attacking the domain name tasting problem. That is the five-day grace period that was intended to give customer a chance for a refund, but was used by speculators to tie up names. But ICANN's action, to withhold a $0.20 name fee charged registrars, is coming only after the World Intellectual Property Organization warned last year that the domain name system was at risk of being turned into a largely speculative market. This problem should have been attacked before then. ICANN doesn't move easily. 

ICANN is off to another distant land on yet another mission of World Peace and Harmony. The adult supervision is going to have to come from the domain name registrars themselves. This ought to be a mature industry by now, capable of informed consensus and acting in the customer's best interest and realizing that ICANN isn't interested in protecting their customers. It’s time for this industry to collectively meet its responsibility.