EUrid at ICANN – Part Deux

I posted very briefly about the EUrid session at ICANN last week and had promised a followup.
When I posted last week the session had only started to warmup and I had no idea how it was going to develop. I don’t think EUrid could have predicted it either.
As the session progressed we heard presentations from various members of Eurid staff. Initially the session seemed to be focussing primarily on the annual report and featured plenty of marketing fluff, that I already mentioned. As a European I didn’t really need to be “treated” to a marketing video showing how incredibly “useful” a .eu domain could be.
The annual report, and the glossy newsletter that accompanied it, took a very interesting spin on the sunrises and landrush.
I’m sure lots of people were fascinated to know all about the incredibly long and totally useless domain names that people have registered. This is surely a lot more important to them than the abusive registrations of .eu domains by cybersquatters or the fees being paid to the Czech court for ADR.
When the ADR costs were mentioned EUrid staff tried to shift the blame to the Czech court. Wow! That took a lot of balls, considering nobody from the Czech court was present to defend themselves.
The annual report contains some intriguing data, particularly with reference to the correlation of ccTLD registrations compared to .eu registrations and the number of .eu registrations per head of population. Much to my amusement the inordinately high number of domains associated with Cyprus is actually mentioned, though no explanation is provided.
For those of us who have been following the .eu fiasco from the outset we are more than capable of filling in the blanks – something that some of the registrars present were not afraid to mention. The EUrid response being “we’re in litagation, so we can’t talk about it”, though they did say that Ovidio’s legal representatives were in the audience.
As the afternoon progressed we were treated to statistics and details of the technical aspects of the registry and how many connections, dns queries etc., they were dealing with.
Of course, at some point, the registrars present could no longer resist the temptation. They simply had to pounce. When else would they get such a wonderful opportunity to raise their valid concerns with the registry?
All the registrars seem to have been having very serious issues with domain transfers and trades. It wasn’t merely a case of one or two registrars signalling isolated incidents. If that had been the case one might have been tempted to lay the blame on the respective registrars, however when you have a group of registrars in a room that represent several million domains globally and they all are complaining of the same issues you would have to wonder …
So what was EUrid response?
In what has to have been the worse PR move I’ve ever seen EUrid management flatly refused to discuss the technical issues that were being raised. They went on the defensive and “got their backs up”.
While they claimed to be willing and interested to listen to registrars many of us present got the distinct impression that this was anything but the case.
.eu is not a ccTLD. It is not a gTLD.
It is meant to be the domain for Europe, its citizens and its businesses.
.eu was brought about for the people of Europe by our elected representatives (one could argue about the finer points of this, but you get the idea).
For an organisation to mismanage a TLD like this is bordering on criminal and personally I find it highly offensive as I am a European citizen.
The IEDR, who manage the IE ccTLD, for example, are open to input from registrars and seem to learn from other registries experiences.
Things I learnt from the session upset and worried me.
Although EUrid was setup very recently and supposedly draws on the experience of several other ccTLDs they do not seem to be prepared technically.
How is it possible that emails sent from them are not consistent?
EUrid admitted that some of the emails were still being written by their staff. Registrars complained that some of the emails generated did not even refer to the domains being handled!
As the session progressed and the discussion became more heated EUrid staff obviously could not handle the situation gracefully. They asked if people would prefer to continue the discussion of the issues and thus skip one of the other presentations, but once this was suggested by the registrars EUrid staff unilaterally decided that it was not the place for the discussion and that their “top-down” presentations were more suitable.
Any suggestions that EUrid should learn from other registries were simply shot down.
The general attitude from EUrid staff was one of condescension and misplaced pretension.
I was so disgusted by their attitude that I didn’t go back in for the second part after the coffee break and also passed up on the dinner they were holding that night. I normally wouldn’t pass up the chance for a free dinner, but I suspected that the food would have stuck in my throat.
I would like to feel that some of the issues stem from a linguistic barrier – as none of the EUrid staff’s native tongue is English, while they insisted on holding the seminar in English.
However I left feeling that the future of .eu was most definitely not in safe hands.
John pointed me at another attendee’s take on the afternoon’s events.