What will it take for us to force Verisign to explain themselves?

[Ryu]

Hi everyone,

I have been wondering about all the chaotic things that have been going on with コム and if anything could be done about it. For various reasons, I am personally not interested in pursuing legal options and would like to seek other course of actions.

The way I look at it is, this "コム" being established as a TLD entirely separate from "com" (i.e., allowing separate ownership) is great injustice to all current "com" users/holders, both ascii and IDNs. And whilst Verisign "may" be legally entitled to go forward with it, they are morally required to explain why such a move is fair/justified to their current customers.

The question I ponder is, what will it take for us to force Verisign to explain themselves? Since this is an issue that negatively affects all current "com" users/holders, could we somehow get online petition or something like that started, which asks Verisign to explain why they could do such a thing against their customers, and ask as many current com users/holders as possible to sign it?

Do you think something like this is feasible? I think this is a completely safe option for us to pursue, and if we could successfully force Verisign to address to the question of business moral/fairness, I think it may be possible that Verisign will be forced to drop the current plan. Or am I just dreaming?

Could I seek your opinions, please?

[domainguru]

I'm not sure how many US corporations operate on the basis of morals / fairness .... their first responsibility is to shareholders.

[Rubber Duck]

Take too long and the outcome would be delliberately vague.

SUMMARY.

Pointless.

[puyang]

Starting an online petition might be a good idea, but needs to target on Japanese websites using ASCII.com. Everyone wants to protect his/her own interests. It's understandable that ASCII.com endusers do not care or even suppress IDN. We need to find a point of entry and we do not give up persuing good dream.

[NameYourself]

A petition will do nothing, they will just ignore it.

[Ryu]

I'm not sure how many US corporations operate on the basis of morals / fairness .... their first responsibility is to shareholders.

Customer interests are also important, are they not? Due to the nature of registry business, Verisign can probably ignore their customers up until a certain point, but shouldn't there be a limit?


Take too long and the outcome would be delliberately vague.

SUMMARY.

Pointless.

But wouldn't the outcome be uncertain whatever we do?


Starting an online petition might be a good idea, but needs to target on Japanese websites using ASCII.com. Everyone wants to protect his/her own interests. It's understandable that ASCII.com endusers do not care or even suppress IDN. We need to find a point of entry and we do not give up persuing good dream.

I agree that non-Japanese ascii.com endusers are unlikely to care about コム, but コム is just a start and will be followed by Russian kom also, right? If I were running, say for example, an English ascii.com website, I would be very unhappy to see someone starting an ascii.kom website. Internet beginners and elder people can be fooled by such dummy sites. Oh, and if ascii.com endusers want to suppress IDN, then that'd add to a reason to question Verisign of their action.


A petition will do nothing, they will just ignore it.

A petition was perhaps a very naive idea. The question for me really is, what is it that Verisign cannot ignore and would be forced to explain.

What they are doing is very fishy/phishy, so they certainly will not want to explain, and will try to ignore any customer that tries to ask them of a reason. But wouldn't there be any venue or means at all where Verisign cannot ignore?

I cannot remember very well, but when ICANN was asking for public comments about new GTLDs, Verisign wasn't planning this, was it? If so, we were thus far given no opportunity at all to address the issue of orally identical therefore confusing and phishy new extensions.

[domainsell]

Maybe start asking questions to them directly on their facebook and twitter page. If enough people blast their social media pages asking them why they are screwing idn.com owners over they may respond?? Maybe shaming them in public via their own pages is a good start??

[domainsell]

https://twitter.com/verisign/

https://www.facebook.com/Verisign/

have at it!!

[domainsell]

I just asked them @verisign on twitter. Get going everyone. Public shaming is the best way these days to get things addressed.

[Ryu]

Maybe start asking questions to them directly on their facebook and twitter page. If enough people blast their social media pages asking them why they are screwing idn.com owners over they may respond?? Maybe shaming them in public via their own pages is a good start??

Thank you for your input, domainsell. Just one thing. I think it's very very important to not limit the case as one concerning only idn.com owners. Verisign's new extensions are available in ascii words, too. What Verisign is doing is damaging to all current com owners.

[domainsell]

looks like we have a few questions @verisign keep it up everyone. :)

[domainsell]

Thank you for your input, domainsell. Just one thing. I think it's very very important to not limit the case as one concerning only idn.com owners. Verisign's new extensions are available in ascii words, too. What Verisign is doing is damaging to all current com owners.

This is a good place to start. :) get going everyone. :))):lol:

[sbe18]

Ryu,

Please post Japanese tech or business press that address this.
I agree the idn.コム is one base.
but Japanese ASCII.com need to voice their anger as well.

Each of the new idn gtld in (com) to follow is going to have new angry constituencies.

so much goodwill and marketing possibilities are being flushed down a toilet for poorly chosen premiums..

bullshit Japanese premiums prove that the other scripts are likely to be horrible .

[Ryu]

Ryu,

Please post Japanese tech or business press that address this.
I agree the idn.コム is one base.
but Japanese ASCII.com need to voice their anger as well.

Each of the new idn gtld in (com) to follow is going to have new angry constituencies.

so much goodwill and marketing possibilities are being flushed down a toilet for poorly chosen premiums..

bullshit Japanese premiums prove that the other scripts are likely to be horrible .

I'll see what I can do in the Japanese language web space. But Verisign is an American company, so it's as much or more important that questions are asked in Engilsh.

Also, I personally think, unless you are contacting Verisign personally, it's better not to talk much or at all about the issue of premium pricing. 99.999999% of the world don't care about premium pricing. Also, in the eye of the public, domainers getting angry about premium pricing could be perceived as very greedy fellows scared of losing their vested interest.

[puyang]

We might need a famous Japanese ASCII.com who voluntarily start to use idn.コム for better marketing or other reasons.

In terms of Versign, .com business is now their cashcow, but .com is subject to the approval from the US ministry of commerce and is due in 2018. If LOTS of .com holders and Versign's stockholders expressed their worry that Versign might not be able to renew .com contract in 2018, the stock price might drop.
The good news is that their .com_in_idn contracts are not subject to the US ministry of commerce. I believe there will be a point in time Versign for own interests starts to push all .com holders to shift to .com_in_idn.

[123]

We might need a famous Japanese ASCII.com who voluntarily start to use idn.コム for better marketing or other reasons.

In terms of Versign, .com business is now their cashcow, but .com is subject to the approval from the US ministry of commerce and is due in 2018. If LOTS of .com holders and Versign's stockholders expressed their worry that Versign might not be able to renew .com contract in 2018, the stock price might drop.
The good news is that their .com_in_idn contracts are not subject to the US ministry of commerce. I believe there will be a point in time Versign for own interests starts to push all .com holders to shift to .com_in_idn.

In my opinion they don't care at all. They will of course be able to renew their .com contract. So far for them there is very little money in IDNs.They pointed out that .TV was insignificant for them and they will think the same about .IDN. It's only when their .com monopoly is threatened they might look for alternatives but that's not really happening. If .com fades so will .IDN so we shouldn't wish for that.

Perhaps 2025. Who knows.

[puyang]

In my opinion they don't care at all. They will of course be able to renew their .com contract. So far for them there is very little money in IDNs.They pointed out that .TV was insignificant for them and they will think the same about .IDN. It's only when their .com monopoly is threatened they might look for alternatives but that's not really happening. If .com fades so will .IDN so we shouldn't wish for that.


Good point. Let's start to find reasons to challenge ASCII.com monopoly but good for IDN.com_in_IDN then.

For example, other registries might not want Verisign to renew .com contract... Maybe we could try contacting donuts.domains for reasons that might impact Versign's stock price?

[Edwin]

I think posters on this thread are VASTLY over-estimating how much the rest of the world cares about this issue. In reality, nobody cares (rounded down).

NOTE: I'm not comfortable about the idn.コム launch process either, but I'm under no illusions that the rest of the world outside a few people on an IDN forum share that view...

[idn]

Personally I'm not sure any of it matters at this point. Not as though these are getting traffic and I haven't heard of any marketing plans.

As of now it looks like we will just start trading these among ourselves as we always have.

[Ryu]

Actually this matters less to us than to future victims of コム scams. Anyone with some foresight can see that's a real possibility and when that happens, a part of responsibilities without doubt lies on Verisign and ICANN.

It's true like Edwin says that the rest of the world hardly cares about this issue at the moment. People start caring only when they realize they got scammed. And it's too late by then. Likewise with current Japanese com operators. They will realize the nastiness of this コム introduction only when they start seeing their dummy sites.

And when all this can be so easily predicted, there is no way to address the risk? How sad!

[clipper]

So, can anyone recommend a good phishing forum so I can figure out how to use these the way Verisign intended?

[sbe18]

Ok, here are the strategy scenarios as I see them:

1- this bullshit premium pricing issue with Verisign is unlikely to change during this priority access period of 60 days.
2- premium pricing rolls over into the general availability for PA's that do not get picked up and for premiums in Verisign's inventory that no one owns or are ASCII.コム domains that ASCII.com owners are about to get phished on by premium buyers or
by buyers who luck out by buying a 'premium' that escapes Verisign's notice.
( NN and LLL owners beware here, and all of the great XXX and porn sites)

3. The remaining dot com in IDN's rollout will be announced eventually. I do not think the order of release will be announced. I simply believe they will announce each one sequentially. This is enormously irritating in its own right.
Odds are that only 1 or 2 more for 2016. Very irritating.

4. Premium pricing for Japanese, indicates that pricing for Chinese and Korean will be equally bad, and likely worse because of simplified/ traditional characters and poor character order.

5. Since we don't know the premium list. It may be that kanji premiums are being reserved, which may affect IDNer's who have the single or double character domains with the intention of Chinese use or end user acquisition. This particularly affects the Snows since they own an amazing list of single character IDN's.
Premium single character in kanji, would complicate single character in Chinese.
Premium/non premium in some cases, and premium/premium in other cases.


6. I believe many of us will skip buying premiums, and adopt the strategy of making the premium buyer buy the dot com in 2017 and later, with end users having to buy the idn.com and the idn.コム separately. Frankly, staying firm and make them buy the
コム first is a toss, until we have a real sense of how deep the premium list really is.
Is it in the hundreds or in the thousands...?
Knowing that ascii.コム names are being priced in the 1000's, it is likely that 10,000 or more names in ascii alone have been premium priced based on all the other ASCII gtld premium gimmicks in the past 2 years.


7 knowing all this bullshit, buying Russian and Arabic premiums that Verisign would not know are really premium seems quite straight forward to me. Since they are basically using Google Translate and poor analytics. These 2 languages look like the best winners based on events since 3/15.

8. Having long discussions in years past about aliasing is now very angering. Moving forward, I simply think コム is the sign of poor corporate behavior to come.
To protect my investment of time and money over the past 9 years, I view IDN.com and IDN.jp for Japanese to be enormously more valuable than IDN.コム .
The eventual IDN.コム premium owner can make me an offer, I am not going to buy egregiously priced Japanese premiums that i am facing.
Any end user for development, wants to minimize risk, and would buy the pairs that make sense.
I think this scenario will play out over the next 2 to 3 years for Japan.
But as Ryu states.
Japanese ASCII.com sites are going to be screaming about being phished by ASCII.コム in the very near future.
s/

[clipper]

Good points, SBE, though I would argue with this:

7 knowing all this bullshit, buying Russian and Arabic premiums that Verisign would not know are really premium seems quite straight forward to me. Since they are basically using Google Translate and poor analytics. These 2 languages look like the best winners based on events since 3/15.


I don't think they used Google Translate; if they had, there would be more consistency among premiums. I speculate that they used an in-house team, basically saying, "OK, everyone who knows something about Japanese raise your hand," and all the Koreans and Chinese raised their hands.

Japanese is fairly simple. If they can't figure out whether a term is primarily used in hiragana, katakana or kanji, then they are definitely not going to get Russian endings or Arabic prefixes right. So, I agree with your conclusion, just not how you got there.;)

4. Premium pricing for Japanese, indicates that pricing for Chinese and Korean will be equally bad, and likely worse because of simplified/ traditional characters and poor character order.

Yes.

Something I read a long time ago (don't know what it was) gave me the impression that Verisign has a high Korean representation in its ranks, which explained the Hangul .net. Now, if that's the case, Korean premiums are going to be ridiculously priced, but likely more accurate and consistent than コム, while other languages are likely to be more haphazard and ranging from difficult to impossible to ascertain, just like コム.

For Chinese, there are now a ton of TLDs in Chinese. The market is flooded with Chinese IDNs at this point. If they put premiums on China they're basically saying they don't want anyone to register them.

[123]

So, can anyone recommend a good phishing forum so I can figure out how to use these the way Verisign intended?

Verisign did not intend to split the extension. ICANN did this. :eek:

[clipper]

Verisign did not intend to split the extension. ICANN did this. :eek:

Yep, you're right.

So, can you suggest a phishing forum?

[123]

Yep, you're right.

So, can you suggest a phishing forum?

What market are you targeting?

For Japan i would suggest:

paypal.コム
https://www.name.com/domain/search-3-9/?keyword=paypal.%E3%82%B3%E3%83%A0

paypal.ком will be available soon.

[domainsell]

What market are you targeting?

For Japan i would suggest:

paypal.コム
https://www.name.com/domain/search-3-9/?keyword=paypal.%E3%82%B3%E3%83%A0

paypal.ком will be available soon.

Nice!:lol:

[Globabel]

Greetings IDNers – Andrew Snow here.

I do not plan on succumbing to VeriSign’s excessive premium pricing and have been discussing this matter with Board members and Counsel of the Internet Commerce Association (ICA).

The ICA, of which I am a member, will through its Counsel shortly be approaching Verisign to seek initiation of a dialogue on this matter for the purpose of discussing why the current pricing level is not in the best interests of existing IDN.com registrants or of VeriSign - and therefore should be changed.

As you can understand, ICA will only be taking this action on behalf of its members. If you want to be part of the group that will engage in this effort - which I would urge you to be - please join the ICA if you are not already a member. Individual annual memberships start at the cost effective level of $600 which can also be done in payments.. For further information and to sign up as a member see: http://www.internetcommerce.org/join/ .