04 November, 2010

Microsoft vs. ICANN

Microsoft's Russell Pangborn has put through a comment highly critical of ICANN efforts on a number of fronts;  he writes:

Contractual Compliance.  "The SSR Plan delineates several important contractual compliance activities. However, the facts that ICANN has not had since early July a Senior Director of Contractual Compliance, that it is unlikely a new Senior Director will be in place before the end of the year, and that both existing and new auditor positions remain open do not bode well for ICANN's ability to conduct these activities effectively."

New gTLDs.  The Board’s September 25 resolution states that “the implementation work completed to date by the community and staff to address the mitigation of malicious conduct issue is sufficient to proceed to launch the first new gTLD application round.”  Microsoft respectfully disagrees with the Board.

We voiced in our DAG1 comments our grave concerns that the “introduction [of potentially hundreds of new ASCII gTLDs] will expand the environment and opportunities for online fraud, an environment and opportunities that will most certainly be seized upon by criminals and their enterprises.” The proposed mechanisms to mitigate malicious conduct fall short. Indeed, the scale and scope of malicious conduct in existing gTLD5 is so enormous that Microsoft has been forced to go to unprecedented lengths and incur tremendous expense to combat such conduct, including obtaining a temporary restraining order in an ex parte “John Doe” action in U.S. federal court to shut down more than 270 domain names linked to the Waldec botnet.

In addition, the introduction of new gTLDs -- more specifically, the predicted increase in contracts and contracted parties -- magnifies existing concerns about ICANN’s ability to ensure contractual compliance that are noted above."

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