On Tuesday, August 25, the ICANN working group on the right protection mechanisms policy development process held an online conference. According to Doman Name Wire, Verisign representative David McAuley suggested adopting the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) procedure as ICANN’s consensus policy and to expand it to all domain zones, including .COM and .NET. He believes that this would help address trademark infringement and DNS abuse, including phishing and delivering malware.
ICANN initially introduced the URS procedure for new domains only, as a response to stakeholders’ concerns that hundreds of new domain names would cause a surge in cybersquatting. Unlike the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), URS allows for quickly blocking a domain name following a complaint. If the registrant fails to prove the legitimacy of their actions, the blocking is automatically extended for the entire registration period, after which the domain name is deleted. In addition, filing a URS complaint is much cheaper that the UDRP procedure. Thus, the proposal seems to be quite favorable for stakeholders.
It cannot be ruled out that under their influence, ICANN reviewed its initial plans and will apply URS to legacy domains when renewing contracts with them. However, .COM and .NET have avoided this fate so far. Verisign’s current initiative will probably make stakeholders happy, and at the same time, draw criticism from domain investors. They have repeatedly (and often rightfully) said that stakeholders sometimes are too careful when demanding legitimate domain names be blocked. However, David McAuley’s proposal has not received unanimous support from the working group. Experts think that URS could be introduced to .COM and .NET without being a consensus ICANN policy if Verisgn makes an agreement directly with ICANN.
