While I was in LA last week John sent me details of the Communications Regulation (Amendment) Bill 2007.
While there are some potentially positive aspects in the Bill some of the Bill’s contents are, for lack of better word, simply crazy.
32.—(5) The regulations shall provide that persons who have registered ‘.ie’ domain names before the regulations came into operation are taken to have registered those names under the regulations.
That is simply wrong.
How can they possibly expect that to hold up in court?
How can they expect anyone to take the .ie ccTLD seriously if they can retroactively apply the bill to the 70k+ IE domains already registered?
They also seem to think that issues surrounding registration disputes are a matter for government:
(6) A person who contravenes subsection (2), or contravenes a regulation made under this section, is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding €5,000.
So that puts it in the realm of civil courts… lovely..
The Bill’s provisions for the management of the IE namespace do offer some hope of industry involvement, but the bulk of the text does not strike me as particularly positive.
If the government is concerned about the present and future of the IE namespace they may have been better advised to look at emulating other ccTLDs. By making explicit provisions for fines and other elements within the context of the Bill it sounds like they have no intention of allowing any freedom of governance.
This is worrying.
Most of this dates back to the Fagan years where the conflict between the board and Mike Fagan (the then CEO of IEDR) made the IEDR an international laughing stock.
The board of IEDR never had any operational experience of the domains industry so I don’t think that anyone in the business is particulary upset to see their position re the .ie ccTLD being deleted. They have been a particularly useless bunch when it comes to the history of .ie ccTLD.
This legislation is quite nasty because it demotes IEDR to a mere service company. And like any other service company, it can have its contract terminated. That is one amazing change.
The freedom of governance issue is moot. The board of IEDR has abused .ie ccTLD (the Fagan years being a classic example) and has there is no industry input to the decisions. With this legislation, the provision for industry input exists.
If it wasn’t for David Curtin and some others, IEDR would still be stuck in the Dark Ages. The board of a registry is not a dumping ground but UCD treated as such. Having a bunch of CV padders rather than people with proven industry expertise meant that .ie has always been at a disadvantage when it came to deciding domain strategy. It was always, apparently, decided largely by a bunch of non-experts who were there purely because of who they knew rather than what they knew about the domains business. As a result, the .ie ccTLD suffered from their lack of experience and knowledge.
The aim of the legislation could very well be to ensure that the board of IEDR doesn’t have the chance to screw up .ie ccTLD ever again. It also provides enough to completely remove .ie from IEDR. Only time will tell if that is a good thing.
John
Industry input would make a huge difference!
Other ccTLDs seem to have various formats for discussing policies etc., whereas in its current format the IE ccTLD does not offer any formal process. It is possible to discuss policy with them, but that’s more of a person to person thing than an actual PAB
Michele