Registry Service Technical Evaluation Panel Gets Its First Case
ICANN made its first referral to a new registry service technical evaluation panel (RSTEP) for study of a proposed “wildcard” link. ICANN Mon. asked the panel to consider a proposal by registry Tralliance to shunt users who type in unregistered .travel domain names to a registration page and search engine. The request for a wildcard linking searchers for travel services and products to “search.travel” has been booed by ICANN’s Security & Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) and other experts. The registry, nevertheless, wants to move ahead, it said.
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As described in Tralliance’s Aug. 23 request, the wildcard service would redirect users entering a nonexistent .travel name to a page indicating the name isn’t registered and is available for registration to eligible entities. The name then is entered automatically in a search that returns information on travel products and services, with .travel results ranked higher than others. Once on the search page, users can continue or log off, undercutting any “anti- competitive fears” about the practice, the registry said.
Tralliance said the service offers benefits: (1) Prospective .travel registrants will learn of available domains, expanding the namespace. (2) Surfers will be exposed to services and wares offered by existing .travel directory registrants. (3) Visitors will have a “consistent user experience” interacting with .travel, “an important consideration given .travel’s lack of exposure.”
The wildcard would resemble .museum’s, which links to a museum directory site, the registry said. But in a Sept.6 opinion to ICANN, SSAC said the proposal more closely resembles a 2003 VeriSign effort that redirected mistyped traffic to a VeriSign-operated site linking to alternate choices and a search engine. That proved so unpopular in the ICANN community that the Internet body ordered VeriSign to remove it. A VeriSign spokesman said the company isn’t commenting on Tralliance’s request.
SSAC advised against Tralliance’s proposal, citing the 2004 committee report urging restriction of wildcard tools for providing default answers to domain name system queries for nonexisting names to “narrow contexts, generally within a single enterprise, and is currently used in top-level domains (TLDs) that are generally small and well-organized.”
Tralliance proceeded with its request. In a Sept. 14 letter to ICANN, the registry voiced disappointment in the SSAC opinion. Search.travel meets panel requirements, it said: “.travel TLD with 20,500 registered domain names and organized specifically for travel and tourism entities should be considered as a TLD that is small and well-organized.”
Ed Cespedes, chief exec. of Tralliance owner TheGlobe.com Inc., said last week that the wildcard service isn’t about money but about “making sure people don’t think .travel isn’t there or is broken.” But Duane Morris attorney and longtime ICANN activist Bret Fausett pooh-poohed the claim. “Every niche registry will make dramatically more money at start-up from a wildcard service with a pay-per- click landing page than it will from its registrations,” he told us. “Whatever Tralliance says about why it needs this service, it’s really about the money.”
Wildcard services like SiteFinder are “bad technology,” said InterWorking Labs Chief Technology Officer Karl Auerbach, a former ICANN board member. The real question is “whether ICANN is a consumer protection agency or whether we want the Internet to be a place where the choice of what services are good or bad” is made by those who buy them or by the regulatory body ICANN has become, he said.
Regulation may have been appropriate for .com because so many incumbent registrants never had a choice, Auerbach said: “But in .travel, who cares whether that TLD business shots itself in the head?” Customers who don’t like it can move, he added.
RSTEP has until Nov. 2 to declare whether search.travel threatens DNS security and stability. Public comments on Tralliance’s request are due Oct. 18 -- tralliance- comments@icann.org. If the board doesn’t approve the service, Tralliance won’t pursue it, a spokesman said.