ICANN/Verisign Proposal Would Allow Any Government To Seize Domain Names

Longtime Slashdot reader GeorgeK and author at FreeSpeech.com writes: ICANN and Verisign have quietly proposed enormous changes to global domain name policy in their proposed renewal of the .NET registry agreement, which is now open for public comments. 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, as it does not respect due process. 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. "This proposal represents a complete government takeover of domain names, with no due process protections for registrants," adds Kirikos. "It would usurp the role of registrars, making governments go directly to Verisign (or any other registry that adopts similar language) to achieve anything they desired. It literally overturns more than two decades of global domain name policy." Furthermore, Kirikos claims ICANN and Verisign "have deliberately timed the comment period to avoid public scrutiny." He writes: "The public comment period opened on April 13, 2023, and is scheduled to end (currently) on May 25, 2023. However, the ICANN76 public meeting was held between March 11 and March 16, 2023, and the ICANN77 public meeting will be held between June 12 and June 15, 2023. Thus, they published the proposal only after the ICANN76 public meeting had ended (where we could have asked ICANN staff and the board questions about the proposal), and seek to end the public comment period before ICANN77 begins. This is likely not by chance, but by design."

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