2003-06-02 - Reconsideration Requests

RESOLVED [03.78] that the Reconsideration Committee's Recommendation RC 02-5 is adopted for the reasons stated in that recommendation.

Whereas, in resolution 02.100 the Board authorized the President and General Counsel to conduct negotiations on behalf of ICANN toward appropriate revisions to the .com and .net registry agreements between ICANN and VeriSign to provide for the offering of a wait-listing service (WLS) as proposed by VeriSign, with various additional conditions;

Whereas, in request for reconsideration RC 02-6 VeriSign requested reconsideration of some of those conditions;

Whereas, the Reconsideration Committee has recommended that Condition c be revised, but that the Board take no other action on reconsideration request RC 02-6;

RESOLVED [03.79] that the Reconsideration Committee's Recommendation RC 02-6 is adopted for the reasons stated in that recommendation; and

FURTHER RESOLVED [03.80] that resolution 02.100 is hereby revised so that the President and General Counsel are authorized to conduct negotiations on behalf of ICANN toward appropriate revisions to the .com and .net registry agreements between ICANN and VeriSign to provide for the offering of a WLS as proposed by VeriSign, with the following additional conditions:

(a) Subscriptions under the WLS in the .com and .net top-level domains shall not be taken by VeriSign Global Registry Services until at least six months have elapsed after implementation of the Redemption Grace Period for all deleted names in those top-level domains;

(b) No preference in connection with, or exclusion from, WLS shall be given because of any registrar-level reservation service;

(c) To avoid an incumbent registrar acquiring a preference in obtaining a WLS subscription through advance knowledge of or control over the deletion of a domain-name registration, there shall be appropriate limitations on that registrar's ability to obtain a WLS subscription on any domain name that it is concurrently sponsoring in the registry;

(d) With regard to transparency of information regarding WLS subscriptions, there shall be an effective mechanism for actively notifying the current domain-name holder upon the placing of a WLS subscription on the name, without revealing the identity of the party holding the WLS subscription;

(e) The WLS shall be offered for a trial period of twelve months, with subscriptions offered for a one-year term so that they last no longer than one year past the end of the trial period; and

(f) There shall be a data-gathering and evaluation program, to be specified in the negotiated revisions to the agreements, that includes mechanisms for analyzing whether the WLS harms the legitimate interests of consumers or others.