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upstart writes:

Red Alert: ICANN and Verisign Proposal Would Allow Any Government In The World To Seize Domain Names:

ICANN, the organization that regulates global domain name policy, and Verisign, the abusive monopolist that operates the .COM and .NET top-level domains, have quietly proposed enormous changes to global domain name policy in their recently published "Proposed Renewal of the Registry Agreement for .NET", which is now open for public comment.

Either by design, or unintentionally, they've proposed allowing any government in the world to cancel, redirect, or transfer to their control applicable domain names! This is an outrageous and dangerous proposal that must be stopped. While this proposal is currently only for .NET domain names, presumably they would want to also apply it to other extensions like .COM as those contracts come up for renewal.

The offending text can be found buried in an Appendix of the proposed new registry agreement. Using the "redline" version of the proposed agreement (which is useful for quickly seeing what has changed compared with the current agreement), the critical changes can be found in Section 2.7 of Appendix 8, on pages 147-148. [...]

It would allow Verisign, via the new text in 2.7(b)(ii)(5), to:

" deny, cancel, redirect or transfer any registration or transaction, or place any domain name(s) on registry lock, hold or similar status, as it deems necessary, in its unlimited and sole discretion" [the language at the beginning of 2.7(b)(ii), emphasis added]

Then it lists when it can take the above measures. The first 3 are non-controversial (and already exist, as they're not in blue text). The 4th is new, relating to security, and might be abused by Verisign. But, look at the 5th item! I was shocked to see this new language:

"(5) to ensure compliance with applicable law, government rules or regulations, or pursuant to any legal order or subpoena of any government, administrative or governmental authority, or court of competent jurisdiction," [emphasis added]

This text has a plain and simple meaning — they propose  to allow "any government", "any administrative authority"  and "any government authority" and "court[s] of competent jurisdiction" to deny, cancel, redirect, or transfer any domain name registration (as I noted above, this is currently proposed  for .NET, but if not rejected immediately with extreme prejudice, it could also find its way into other registry agreements like .COM which the abusive monopolist Verisign manages).

You don't have to be ICANN's fiercest critic to see that this is arguably the most dangerous language ever inserted into an ICANN agreement.

Original Submission