What Policies Should the IEDR Be Using?

The recent introduction of “personal IE domains” has been welcomed by all parties, but I get the impression that a lot of people are still unhappy with the restrictive policies being used by the IEDR.
What would people like to see?
Should we have a more open policy?
Should it be a “free for all”?
Are there advantages to a “managed name space”?
Are there disadvantages?
At the moment there aren’t that many issues with cybersquatting, spam or phishing in the IE namespace. There are issues – yes. But the barriers that exist at present render dotIE to be too awkward to be of interest to the average online criminal.
One possible solution would be to introduce a couple of subdomains such as co.ie or me.ie etc., that might help with the rules and policies.
Of course the main issue at present is that there is no formal policy development process.

About the Author: Michele Neylon

Known for his outspoken opinions on technology and the Internet, Michele Neylon is the award winning author of several blogs and co-host of the Technology.ie podcast. A thought leader in the Internet community, Neylon is active within ICANN and an expert on policy, security, domains, ICANN, Nominet and Internet Governance. You can stalk him on various social media networks including Twitter and Instagram

2 Comments

Joe Lennon November 9, 2007 at 16:00

I think the IEDR has now addressed one of the major flaws in the .ie space, but as I said before, it should have been addressed a long time ago.
I don’t think a free for all is the way to go forward mind you. Whatever about cybersquatting issues, I think the main concern would be how the IEDR would handle several thousand domain registrations a day. When they eased the personal .ie domain restrictions they said it may take up to a week to process the registration, just imagine if everyone could register any available domain name, registrations could be delayed months!
I would prefer to see an improvement of the current service, with registration and transfer turnaround times being reduced to under a day. I would also like to see a price drop, .ie domain names are far too expensive.
I don’t like the idea of introducing .co.ie, .me.ie and so forth. Firstly I like the short-length of .ie, secondly, I think it sounds strange and wouldn’t be good for radio/TV advertising. Also our ccTLD doesn’t hold enough domains to justify segmenting it.
Michele Neylon November 9, 2007 at 16:22

Joe
If the rules were completely relaxed then there wouldn’t be any delays in processing ….
Michele