ICANN bares its milk teeth, grows incisors?

Friday 28th June 2002

ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, yesterday released its proposal for the management of cybersquatters. The idea undoubtedly has some worth, but does anyone care what ICANN says anymore?

At one of its recent quarterly meetings the organisation finally came up with a proposal to prevent cybersquatters getting into online real estate and, potentially, financially exploiting the genuine owners of the property. The proposal which, frankly, my grandmother could have come up with years ago, concerns the implementation of a period of grace that will give site owners a 30 day window within which they can renew the domain, says Reuters.

It ain't rocket science this stuff. The problem that this solves was, and still is, a painfully stupid one. When an organisation registers an Internet domain they do so on an annual basis. One year later they will be sent an email telling them to renew this contract. If they don't do it pretty much immediately the domain is released and a cybersquatter, typically, snaps it up. Therefore, a 30 day period of grace has always been the obvious solution. Shame it took so long.

The effect of ICANN making these proposals is that registrars will adopt these measures, presumably. And it's thought that the ruling could be decided today — we'll keep you posted. 

This is a big week for ICANN. It's come up with an intelligent measure, which is nice. But more importantly, it's also going to vote on its future. Recently some of the organisation's board members admitted to the world that it was a failed experiment in Internet policy development. The world already knew that, but admired the honesty. The problem with ICANN was, and perhaps still is, that it hasn't been very effective. It hasn't prioritised its actions correctly, in my opinion. And it has never really looked like it understood what was going on in the Internet.

More at: http://www.it-analysis.com/article.php?id=2330