Recent Posts
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DI implicated in .sucks “gag order” fight
Vox Populi, the .sucks registry, terminated Com Laude’s accreditation last week due to its belief that the brand protection registrar had leaked a “confidential” document to Domain Incite.
Vox Pop CEO John Berard tonight denied that the company he works for was carrying out a “grudge” against Com Laude, which in January led a charge against a Vox “gag order” on registrars.
As we reported on Friday, Vox terminated Com Laude‘s ability to sell .sucks domains directly, due to a then-unspecified alleged breach of the Registry-Registrar Agreement that binds all .sucks domain registrars.
It now turns out the “breach” was of the part of the .sucks RRA that states that Vox registrars “shall make no disclosures whatsoever” of “confidential informational”, where such confidential information is marked as such.
Berard told DI of the termination: “It was a specific act, violating a specific clause of the contract that had to do with breaching confidentiality, and that’s why the action was taken.”
The specific act was Com Laude allegedly sending DI — me, for avoidance of doubt — a confidential document.
“They have not said they didn’t do it,” Berard said.
He said that, given the amount of scrutiny Vox is under (due to the controversy it has created with its pricing and policies), “it would be crazy of us to ignore a contract breach”.
He declined to identify the document in question.
He said that Vox Pop deployed “forensic research” to discover the identity of the alleged leak.
“It was clear that something that was confidential was distributed, we wanted to know who distributed it,” he said. “We wanted to know who breached confidentiality.”
DI has only published one third-party document related to .sucks this year.
This is it (pdf). It’s a letter drafted by the Registrars Stakeholder Group and sent to ICANN. Here it is (pdf) as published on the ICANN web site.
DI has received other documents related to Vox Pop and .sucks from various parties that I have not published, but I’ve been unable to find any that contained the word “confidential” or that were marked as “confidential”.
According to the .sucks RRA (pdf), “confidential information” is documentation marked or identified “confidential”.
Everything I’ve ever written about .sucks can be found with this search.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUhQBpXIHYw