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PIR thinks 20-year domain regs are a good idea

Kevin Murphy, December 23, 2019, 13:52:16 (UTC), Domain Registries

Want to lock in the price of a .org domain for 20 years? Public Interest Registry thinks that might be a good idea.
In a blog post, head of policy Paul Diaz wrote:

PIR supports the ICANN community conducting policy work that could extend the maximum allowable registration term to 20 years. We’d look to ICANN to support the community’s policy work and, if consensus is reached, to change the longstanding ICANN policy that currently limits registration to 10 years uniformly across all registries.

Extending the maximum permitted reg/renewal to 20 years was suggested last week by ICANN’s Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group as one of a few ideas to protect registrants following PIR’s acquisition by for-profit investor Ethos Capital.
It’s worth drawing the distinction here that PIR is only saying it would support consensus policy work to introduce the new limit across all gTLDs, not just .org.
And it might be a bit of a pipe-dream anyway, at least in the short term.
ICANN’s volunteer community still languishes under its perpetual workload/burnout problems, and I doubt there’s a massive appetite to open up yet another Policy Development Process right now, particularly one with potentially significant technical and business model implications.
If a PDP were to open, why would the output limit regs to just 20 years? Why not 100? Why not make the limit arbitrary?
Diaz was less committal on NCSG’s suggestion that the Uniform Rapid Suspension process be removed from the .org contract, saying merely that PIR would comply with (not necessarily support) a consensus policy emerge removing URS from all gTLDs.
On NCSG’s demand that PIR/Ethos commit itself to freedom of speech in .org, Diaz noted that PIR has suspended 36,000 .org domains this year, almost all of which were due to technical abuse such as malware distribution, botnets and phishing.
Ten domains were suspended based on content, he wrote. Eight of those were publishing child abuse material and two were illegally selling opioids.

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Comments (5)

  1. Rubens Kuhl says:

    Actually, years-long registrations are terrible for continued business relationship. Your customer doesn’t know you anymore, and brings less new business.

  2. gpmgroup says:

    Removing URS is unlikely as it is a current RPM working group charter question and an individual member’s proposal to remove URS has just been revisited by the working group a couple of meetings ago.
    The grounds for dropping the member’s proposal to remove URS was that there was no prospect of reaching a working group consensus for removing URS if the matter was voted on.
    As a result the individual member’s proposal will not be included in the working group’s draft report for public comment

  3. Mark Thorpe says:

    Only 20 years for legit domains that have active websites.

  4. Reviewu says:

    Will we be using domains in 20 years?

  5. wanker says:

    Why not till heat death of the universe?

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