Clarification on Cybersquatting Occurrence Possibilities from ICANN’s CEO

A letter from the president of ICA, Jeremiah Johnston to ICANN’s CEO, Fadi Chehade, allowed the latter to come with a public answer related to some statements he had expressed in an interview that he gave in Switzerland at  the World Economic Forum held in Davos. According to Mr. Johnston, the CEO’s remarks were interpreted as characterizing the domain purchasers as “cybersquatters”.

In order to clarify this, Mr. Chehade mentions in his letter that he thanks for the opinions and comments he had been receiving along time from the members of the Internet Commerce Association, which contributed in designing a policy of good practices inside the domain names community. At the same time, he mentioned that he appreciates all the efforts that ICA made to discourage what are called the “hogging names”.

ICANN’s CEO continues expressing regrets that ICA misinterpreted his comments on the possibility that some investors might grab domain names in order to practise cybersquatting and pointed out that the program about gTLDS was created to address the lack of availability of domains, and not offer the chance of bad practices on the market.

Mr. Chenade ends his letter with his certainty that registry operators and registrars will now be able to innovate their services with the new program being implemented, and that it will also lead to a decrease of illegal or immoral activities in this field. He concluded that the only regulator and evaluator of “premium” registering of domains will be the market itself in the end.