| reply to MooJohn
Re: Why a grace period at all? The grace period exists because their are people out there that steal credit cards and use them. The domain name provider needs the ability to take back the domain after the credit card company issues the charge back. In addition to taking it back they need to be able to put the domain back into the pool and not pay ICAAN their fee, otherwise they end up eating the cost of every fraudulent purchase. The grade period provides that to the registrars. ICAAN just needs to change the policy such that it can only be used for charge backs, not holding onto domains that are searched.
Frankly the biggest problem is the artificial scarcity of domain names. If ICAAN issued a few hundred new root domains the issues of domain squatting and these grace period things would go away as there would be very little value to the domains. But ICAAN benefits from the scarcity, because without it the domain squatters wouldn't be buying 10000 domains and paying for them yearly in the hope of selling them. It's probably time we turn the management of the numbers over to the ITU and I'm not sure I don't support turning the names over to the ITU as well. |
