ICANN approves wait list for desired domains

Anyone hoping to buy expiring Internet domain names that end in .com and .net may be able to place their names on a wait list, according to a preliminary decision that must be approved by the U.S. Department of Commerce before it becomes official.

During a meeting in Rome, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved VeriSign's request to conduct a 12-month trial of the so-called Wait Listing Service, putting to rest one of the Mountain View, Calif.-based company's chief complaints about ICANN.

ICANN, a prominent Internet governing body, had been negotiating with VeriSign since March 2002 over details of the Wait Listing Service. Claiming that ICANN was stalling and blocking innovation, VeriSign filed a federal lawsuit against ICANN on Feb. 26 that asked for an injunction permitting the Wait Listing Service to go forward with little intervention. No ruling has happened in the case.

The Wait Listing Service would work like this: Domain name registrars could make reservations for expiring .com and .net domains on behalf of their customers. Only one reservation would be accepted for each domain name, on a first-come, first-served basis. The existing domain name holder would always have the option to renew it.

VeriSign, which has a government contract to run the master database for .com and .net, has claimed that the Wait Listing Service would bring some structure to the oft-chaotic way that expiring domain names are handled. VeriSign runs the database under contract with ICANN and the Commerce Department, both of which must approve the proposal.

But the suggestion has drawn sharp criticism from some domain name registrars, which have filed their own lawsuit against both ICANN and VeriSign, alleging that the planned service will hurt their businesses by permitting VeriSign to leverage its government-granted monopoly over two of the Internet's most popular areas of real estate.

The ongoing courtroom jockeying among ICANN, VeriSign and the registrars has worried some veteran engineers and policy analysts, who fear that it could destabilize the core of the Internet. This week, the People For Internet Responsibility group announced an emergency conference titled "Preventing the Internet Meltdown," to take place in Los Angeles this summer.

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Waiting List should Wait

The company I work for has had to deal with this Waiting List Service directly. Unfortunately Verisign and their partners could not wait for the WLS to be approved by the US Dept of Commerce before making it appear to users that this service was up and running.
The whole thing WLS is about is power, power over market share. In this case the market is the buying and selling of domain names. The current and long held method of the domain name market is filled by many companies who purchase domains that expire then turn around and resell them to the highest bidder. Of course this has led to a large amount of unsavory activities by individuals that work for registrars, these individuals accomplices, or even registrars themselves being involved in the buying and reselling of domain names. Often the prices for these domains are highly inflated, and are beyond the price of reason.
Certainly some sort of control needs to be implemented so that when a domain name expires a person that really wants the domain to USE it not SELL it has a chance to purchase said domain name. Personally I enjoyed the even older method of first come first serve which is how it was before all these, (I'll put it mildly), jerks got involved in usurping anyone with valid interest in a domain name.
It's great that Verisign is trying to implement some sort of orderly way of doing this. However don't be fooled that this is Verisign doing something only in the interest of the public. Verisign's interest is in the market of domain name sales and they have come up with WLS to take the power away from domain name hawkers.
That is all fine and dandy, but first maybe they should have an actual working system in place before letting the public take part in signing up to obtain a domain name after expiration, only to find out that a registrars reseller (read buddy domain hawker) was able to purchase the domain three days before the domain expiration date. Which is what happened to my company when using Enom.com and their WLS service under Verisign.