At 9/25/04 3:52 PM, elliot noss wrote: >factual circumstances where >the registrant, say my mom for example, is worse off in a situation >where they are the primary economic beneficiary and are not opted out?
Well, if the registrant has disappeared (i.e., doesn't respond to any messages about the forthcoming expiration and possible auctioning of the domain name), she can't benefit from an auction, can she? You wouldn't have any way to pay her the money you collect. More to the point, though, you're missing the fundamental argument against this, which is that domain names that expire do not belong to the registrant, or to Tucows, or to anyone else; they belong to "the public". Anything a registrar does to interfere with the domain name's reversion to a completely unregistered state is taking unfair advantage of that registrar's market power (in other words, taking advantage of the happenstance fact that the domain name was previously registered through that registrar) in a way that is quite clearly not the intent of ICANN (and I wholeheartedly agree with ICANN on this point; larger, older registrars would have an obvious advantage over new registrars). Simply put, if your Mom abandons a domain name, as far as I can tell she has no legal right to make any money off an auction of it (even if you could somehow find and pay her), and neither does Tucows. "The public" gets it back. And that's exactly how it should be, even aside from the legal argument: After all, in most cases, it wasn't the actions of your Mom or Tucows that made the name valuable. It's worth money to someone else simply because it's high-profile by its very nature, or because it happens to match the name of their company, for example; I can't see why it's good public policy to reward your Mom or Tucows for that when they had nothing to do with it.) Obviously, the argument against this (well made by Chuck Hatcher in a separate message) is "but if my Mom and/or Tucows don't make money off it, some bastard will reregister it -- taking advantage of another market imbalance -- and make a profit off it, and that's even less fair!". Yep, that's usually going to happen right now, and it absolutely sucks and needs to be fixed, but honestly, do you think the fix is to grab the money yourself instead? The proper solution is something that funnels the extra profit from expiring names back to "the public" that owns them. Such solutions are trivial to come up with: for example, the registry could have registrars auction off expiring domain names but put 100% of the profit towards lowering registry fees for other domain names, lowering the average retail price. Anything like that has a snowball's chance in hell of being adopted, of course, because there's no financial incentive for any of the current players (including those of us on this list), but it is clearly preferable in terms of public policy to any scheme that rewards a registrant who abandons the name, a registrar who was simply lucky enough to be chosen by that registrant years ago, or a registry who was given the contract to run the technical side of domain registration but now thinks they actually own all the domain names (which is like the Yosemite concession franchise deciding they own Yosemite's resources and can start logging it). I really don't like the argument that "this unfair thing is justified because otherwise someone else is going to do something even more unfair". You guys are better people than that. Focus your efforts on doing the right thing (you *can* introduce a perfectly ethical, useful auction service that benefits registrants who ask you to auction the name) and making the overall system more fair and more to the benefit of the general public, instead of grubbing maniacally in the dirt trying to grab a part of the spoils. Just my two cents. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies http://www.tigertech.net/ "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." -- Darwin
