Last month Afilias, the domain registry for .INFO, proposed a new "Abusive Domain Use Policy" that would appear to give them arbitrary power to decide what is and is not acceptable. Consider the following language:

Pursuant to Section 3.6.5 of the RRA, Afilias reserves the right to deny, cancel or transfer any registration or transaction, or place any domain name(s) on registry lock, hold or similar status, that it deems necessary, in its discretion;Now it appears (thanks to Domain Name News for the tip) that ICANN has approved the proposed policy and given the green light to implementation. The ICANN letter states that they found no "...significant competition or security and stability issues" and asks Afilias to report on results of the changes. But ICANN did not explicitly solicit public comment on the change before approving it. As DomainNameNews points out though, comments to any registry proposal can be submitted at any time by sending an email to registryservice (at) icann.org and are published on the ICANN website."





