These cybersquatting laws have gone wild; they've just gone too far. Right now, the law seems to say that if someone sends you a letter [ asking] you to give up your domain name, and you say, "OK, at least reimburse me the $35 I spent to register it," they could interpret it as holding the name for ransom, which would then be considered cybersquatting. And you'd be breaking the law. On the other side, there really are people who register names and sit on them to wait for money.
So as far as a recommendation, I would say go ahead and preregister, but leave paper trails that show that you have intent to use the name for a business. That way, you can prove you're not cybersquatting and won't get in trouble later.
Q: ICANN's going to have this global election soon to elect board members from the general public. It seems there are now enough at-large members to hold the election. How will the election work?
ICANN: We only have about 12,000 members right now, but [ that's] definitely enough to have the election. Now it's just time to get the structure set up, so there will be a nominating committee [ and] guidelines about how to become a nominee and what to do if you're not chosen by the nomination committee. In that case, you could still get enough names on a petition to get on the ballot.
And actually, the election structure was changed slightly at the March 2000 ICANN meeting in Cairo, due to some concerns by some different groups that felt the original process wasn't democratic enough. There was going to be an at-large council. Now there's going to be a nominating committee with a direct election. We're going to start off with five seats, one from each geographic region. That will take place in order to get those five people seated by the annual meeting this November.
The terms of the current board members were supposed to be up by September 30, but they've been extended now until the annual November meeting. Four of the initial board members will remain, but it hasn't been decided yet which ones. Some people were concerned that half of the board would be leaving at one time, which would be tough for the organization, especially since all of the experience and expertise of the people who have been doing this for a while would all leave at the same time.
ICANNWatch: That election will be a difficult problem. There's no nice way to do it, especially since [ there are] no natural constituencies. There's no clear way of knowing who the constituents are - that is, the Internet users - or how many people know or care about the issues.
And what about all the people who don't read English? My guess is that ICANN has disenfranchised a bunch of people from the election who don't know English.
Basically, with ICANN, we're talking about governance without representation, which is a dangerous game. Many other countries disagree that a fundamentally U.S. organization should have the governance over the domain space.
Any way you look at it, this election will be a riot. But I don't have any better solution for the problem. Maybe if you assume, for instance, that the majority of governments in the world do represent their people, then maybe ICANN needs to pick a legislature from every country and let them make up the ICANN board.
Q: What do you think the global election is going to change? How will it affect the way the domain name space is regulated?
ICANN: The biggest change is just that there will be more voices and more input. Right now, the people who have been participating in ICANN's policy making are the same old group of people, and they have their own specific agendas. Having more individual users participating can only be a good thing. It's the end users who will be affected by the decisions [ and] will have a better way to make their comments known and participate.
Today, the Internet is pretty American, for good or bad, but there are a lot of people out there who use the Internet who aren't American. So, we expect that the election will increase the globalization of the whole ICANN effort, getting more global input into the decision making. Getting the world up to speed, educated on the issues, and involved can only be good for the whole process.
ICANNWatch: It's going to create endless chaos, and I don't think it's going to change much for the better. The biggest question is, Who the hell can vote?
And the election itself is going to get crazy. If ICANN announces to the registered at-large members that the election will take place at such and such time, they need to expect there will be tons more people registering to be members right away.
And how do you tell if the people who register to be voting members are real people? I mean, to be an at-large voting member of ICANN, you just sign up using your e-mail address. But most people have a few different e-mail addresses, so will they get to vote more than once?
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