Re: [ga] Afternic Auctioning register.com expireds
Hi Eric,
The obvious remedy would be for ICANN to look at
formlating a set policy on speculation and warehousing by the registrars
themselves to quash this activity.
Currently, there are registrars that auction a
"chase fee" to attempt to register domains as they are deleted. They have
customers before they attempt to acquire the domains and do not hold the domains
in their own name looking for a buyer.
The proposed Afternic/register.com scenario means
that afternic would be gifted the domains to auction by register.com. This
means that the auction value is simple speculation on the domains themselves and
there is no scope for other registrars to sell a new domain registraiton of the
same character string.
Also, because they would be injected with domains
from register.com that were originally paid for, they would be, to all
intents and purposes, warehousing the domains.
If all registrars are equal, then if Verisign were
to adopt a similar policy using Greatdomains as the auction/sales entity then it
would mean a reduction in competition and a reduction in registrations made by
the other registrars that benefit from their share of deleted domain
registrations.
As a secondary thought, if afternic held these
domains for auction, couldn't they fall foul of the udrp in regard to
intellectual property rights too as they would not be offering a registration
service and the domains would belong to them/register.com during the auction
process?
Regards
Paul Cotton
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