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“Send registrars to jail!”, ICANN hears

Kevin Murphy, October 13, 2014, 09:25:53 (UTC), Domain Policy

ICANN is ramping up its focus on contractual compliance in the midst of calls for domain industry offenders to “go to jail”.
CEO Fadi Chehade yesterday revealed that he has has promoted chief contracting counsel Allen Grogan to the newly created role of chief contract compliance officer.
Grogan, who Chehade has worked with off and on since 1991, will report directly to him. Maguy Serad, who has been heading compliance under Chehade for the last couple of years, will now report to Grogan.
In a session with the GNSO Council at the ICANN 51 public meeting in Los Angeles yesterday, Chehade said the appointment was part of a new “strategic, analytical” approach to compliance.
It was hinted that the compliance focus may form part of Chehade’s address at the formal opening ceremony of ICANN 51 later today.
Ron Andruff of the Business Constituency made the “jail” comments in response.
“We need to see action, we need to see teeth,” he said. “We never see any really strong action taken and it’s time we did. It’s time we saw people go to jail for doing things, lose their contracts for doing things.”
“We’ve lived through 15 years of ICANN with all manner of transgressions, some very serious ones, but they all get slid off to the side and there’s never any mention of it,” he said.
“Should someone be the recipient of extremely strong actions — losing their contract, being thrown out the community — that would send a signal,” he said.
Andruff appeared to be relating comments made by the Intellectual Property Constituency’s Kristina Rosette, at a private Commercial Stakeholders Group meeting earlier that day.
However, Rosette was quick to take to Twitter to deny she’d said anything about jail time.


Chehade, in reply to Andruff, agreed with the need for action but clarified what he plans to do.
“It doesn’t mean to create a police force, that’s not what we need,” he said. “What we need is thoughtful, analytical analysis.”
“It doesn’t mean we’re going to take the job of all the global consumer protection agencies,” he said earlier in the session.
The notion of ICANN having the power to directly jail somebody is of course laughable — all of its power comes from its contracts with registrars and registries.
However, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that ICANN could refer registrars to law enforcement should it come across suspected illegality in the course of its compliance investigations.
ICANN Compliance currently employs 21 people and deals with 5,000 complaints per month, Chehade said.
In the last year, the number of breach, suspension and termination notices against registrars has been on the increase.
Notably, last November a registrar owned by “spam king” Scott Richter was terminated. Notorious domain “slammer” NameJuice faces possible termination this Friday based on a July suspension notice.

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Comments (2)

  1. Acro says:
    October 13, 2014 at 5:08 pm

    What about Registrars that fail to comply with basic security standards and lose domains to thieves?

    Reply
  2. Ron Andruff says:
    October 13, 2014 at 9:52 pm

    Whoa…. apologies for my misuse of a figure of speech and also implying Kristina said the ‘j’ word… She did not to be clear! The word ‘compliance’ always gets me going and I got a little caught up in my passion for this topic. The key message I was attempting to bring across is that – in the interest of both users and the institution – we need to ensure that those that run afoul of their contractual obligations face strong repercussions (and we’ll let the courts determine if or when someone needs to go to jail ;o).
    Apologies again to Kristina for dragging her into my unfortunate faux pas….

    Reply

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