FC: ICANN responds to politech message about evicting .org owners

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Also, Tuyet A. N. Tran writes in to say that the NYNMA's 3/6 privacy event 
has been postponed due to the nor'easter.

Below is a followup to:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-01787.html
http://www.politechbot.com/p-01774.html

-Declan

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From: "Andrew McLaughlin" <mclaughlin () pobox com>
To: <declan () well com>
Subject: RE: Why are ICANN-crats talking about evicting .org owners?
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2001 13:16:33 -0500

Declan:

We don't have any intention of kicking out existing domain name holders.
The idea is to turn over management of .org to some appopriate
organization/association/entity/whatever, which would then make decisions
about .org registration policy.

I'm always amazed by the amount of misreporting & hyperventilation about
domain name stuff -- this one's no exception.

--Andrew

     -------------------------------------------------------------------
andrew mclaughlin        |       chief policy officer & cfo
internet corporation for assigned names and numbers
<ajm () icann org>         |        <http://www.icann.org>
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To: declan () well com
From: "Joe Sims" <jsims () JonesDay com>
Subject: Re: FC: Why are ICANN-crats talking about evicting .org owners?
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2001 13:14:41 -0500

Declan, since I negotiated the proposed agreements on behalf of ICANN, I
thought I should point out that this particular issue is a red herring
generated by bad news reporting.  The proposed agreements make it clear
that what will happen to .org after VeriSign gives it up, and what (if
anything) will happen to existing registrations, will be the subject of
the normal consensus development process over the next year or so.  To
repeat:  contrary to some news stories (and an early, incorrect SlashDot
posting), there have not been (and could not be) any decisions made on
either of these issues, since those decisions are obviously policy issues
that must be resolved by community consensus.  Obviously, even if future
registrations in .org were limited to non-commercial organizations (which
clearly was the original intent), existing registrations could easily be
grandfathered if that was thought to be the fair and equitable thing to do,
as many people argue.  The point is that this should and will be debated to
a community consensus, which is the way the process should work, so no one
is in jeopardy now.

Joe Sims
Jones Day Reavis & Pogue
51 Louisiana Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20001
Direct Phone:  1.202.879.3863
Direct Fax:  1.202.626.1747
Mobile Phone:  1.703.629.3963

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Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2001 14:20:35 -0500
From: vint cerf <vcerf () mci net>
Subject: Re: FC: Why are ICANN-crats talking about evicting .org owners?

The proposal is just a proposal - and the question of
the presence of non-not-for-profits in the .org registry
is still quite open.  ICANN has no desire to create hardship
where there isn't any. It seems unlikely that existing registrants
would be "evicted" without a good deal of discussion and planning
and for the sake of simplicity and fairness, it would seem more
reasonable to limit FUTURE registrations - the messy part is the
possibility of some kind of gold rush to register before such
registrations (ie of for-profit organizations) would no longer
be accepted.

vint cerf

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Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2001 10:47:41 -0800
From: Brian Thomas <cinnamon () pft com>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Subject: Re: FC: Why are ICANN-crats talking about evicting .org owners?

Thought you'd like a comment on this.

I want hostmaster () netcom com from 1992-1993, and as such handled
registration of all domain names for Netcom's customers. At that time
it was generally understood that .net was for ISP's, .com was for
companies, .org was for non-profit organizations, and .edu was for
universities. At no time, however, did the Internic actually enforce any
of these besides .edu; they started a policy (That I don't know if they
continue today) that .edu was only allowed for '4-year, accredited
universities'. As responsible netizens we usually tried to explain the
individual TLD's purposes, but this wasn't a hard and fast rule, and it
was more our company policy than anything the Internic enforced.

Amusingly enough, I believe I was also one of the first to deal with a
would-be domain broker. A customer tried to register some 75 domains with
us over the course of a week, and I remember quite a few discussions
with management over whether we would allow this. He was threatening to
sue if we didn't give him all the ones he wanted; eventually we allowed
him something like 20 that had to do with his company's stated purpose.
(Which I'm sure had little to do with how he actually intended to profit
from the names.)

Anyway, thought I'd share.

Brian

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