I support the ICA because I want to protect the living that I make from the domain industry, and that's what the ICA does. The ICA protects my business, and it helps ensure that we can all continue to have a business buying and selling domain names.
Why does the domain business need protecting? Because domain names are not like gold or cars, they are intangible assets defined by a set of rules and those rules keep changing.
I recently tweeted about the crew.com UDRP decision where 20 years ago J. Crew used the UDRP to take my crew.com domain name, which I considered to be my business asset that I was entitled to register and to own. But a UDRP panel decided otherwise. The majority said that it violated the rules governing domain names to trade in a domain name that was similar to an existing trademark. Well nearly all common words and acronyms are trademarked. The interpretation of the UDRP by the majority of the panel in the crew.com dispute, if it had become widespread, would have wiped out much of the domain investing industry.
More recently some UDRP panelists pushed an interpretation of the UDRP called the "Retroactive Bad Faith" theory. This theory said that if you use a domain name in bad faith to target a trademark, even a trademark that came after your domain registration, that it demonstrated that your original registration of the domain name was made in bad faith. Some panelists interpreted bad faith targeting quite broadly - PPC ads that were for products or services similar to those offered by the company with the trademark, or publicly offering a domain name for sale. If Retroactive Bad Faith had become the consensus interpretation of the UDRP, then that could have wiped out much of the domain investment industry.
Even more recently, a three-member UDRP panel ordered the transfer of the domain name ADO.com, which was owned by a well-known domain investor. The panel said that the asking price was too high and that meant the domain investor had bought the domain name to target the "well known" trademark holder - a Mexican bus company. If this interpretation of the UDRP - that setting a high asking price would be considered bad faith and result in the loss of your domain name - then that could have a damaging effect on the domain industry.
The UDRP is just one set of the rules that we are at the mercy of - and the UDRP is just one set of policies that come out of ICANN. Much of our fate is determined by what happens at ICANN. Most people in the domain industry don't know much about what goes on at ICANN. We're too busy running our businesses. But what happens at ICANN can affect whether we can continue running our businesses.
ICANN doesn't have a great track record. Many of their decisions make it appear that they are under the thumb of the big registries like Verisign and the Public Interest Registry (PIR) that runs .org. As many of you know, ICANN recently told PIR that it was lifting all price caps on .org and PIR can set whatever price it wants for .org registrations and renewals. Verisign saw what happened with .org and likely wants the same ability that PIR got to set whatever price it wishes on registrations and renewals, and to be able to premium price deleting domains and keep all the upside for itself. If Verisign succeeds and sharply increases the renewal prices, it could destroy the business models of many domain investors.
The people shown above who are members of the ICA aren't idiots. They don't throw their money away for no good reason. Instead, they run successful businesses. They want to protect those business. ICA members recognize that there are endless policy battles that must be fought to keep the domain industry thriving.
The ICA fights those battles on behalf of the domain industry. The people who have joined the ICA are doing so to join together with other members of the industry to protect the future of the domain name industry for everyone involved - those who contribute to the effort and those who don't. We'll gladly recognize those who are contributing to the common good. We'll provide a little more recognition to those who contribute more.
ICA members receive little tangible in the way of direct benefits. Yet it is a great community to be a part of. We recognize that it is a situation of united we stand, divided we fall, and we have chosen to unite together for the better of the domain industry.
