ICANN has announced a workshop on the Domain Name Marketplace for tomorrow at the ICANN meeting in Marrakech/Morocco. You are invited to comment.

The following topics will be covered:

• Introduction
• Life Cycle of a Domain Name
• History & Evolution of the domain name marketplace
• Monetization
• Add-Grace
• Expiring Names Practices
• Long-Tail Proposal
• ICANN Policy Implications

The listed paricipants are:

• Jothan Frakes, Executive Producer, Domain Roundtable Conference
• Tim Cole, Chief Registrar Liaison, ICANN
• John Berryhill, Intellectual Property Attorney
• Josh Meyers, GM, Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Roberto Gaetano, ALAC Board Liaison
• Sarah Deutsch, VP & Associate General Counsel, Verizon Communications
• Tim Ruiz, VP Corporate Development & Policy Planning, Go Daddy
• Rob Hall, CEO, Momentous/Pool
• David Maher, Senior VP – Law & Policy, Public Interest Registry (.ORG)
• Jonathon Nevett, VP and Chief Policy Counsel, Network Solutions
• Pat Kane, Director, Business Operations and Policy, VeriSign
• Paul Stahura, CEO, Demand Media/eNom
• Bruce Tonkin, Chair, GNSO Council

Judging from the topics covered and the participants, this is going to be an interesting workshop. For those not attending, you might be able to listen in/participate remotely. Most likely there will be no earth shattering decisions made here, but this workshop is one of the first steps in laying the groundwork for how ICANN views the domainer industry.

One item in the agenda seems of a special interest to most domainers: Paul Stahura’s Long-Tail Proposal. Probably this is an improved version of his whitepaper as posted on the registrar and GNSO mailinglists. The whitepaper tries to address the problem of the added system load due to traffic testing. The suggestion is to add additional registration types (referred to as Cred types in the proposal) at a lower fee. Both types are basically an option on the name, since the name remains available for traditional registrations at any time.
Type 1 would allow the registrant to take register a domain, for a price far below the current price of the $6 dollar registry fee (“near $0.00“). The domains would all point at a central server, and the revenue generated by this name would be passed on to the registrar, who can share it with the registrant. In order to limit abuse, the suggestion is to actually charge $6 at the time of registration, which would be credited back to the registrar if the domain is deleted or converted to another registration type. The name would remain available to traditional registrations (and the registrar would be refunded the amount paid for the name if the name is registered by another party).
Type 2 would allow the registrant to use their own nameservers for the registration, at a lower fee (suggestion is $2.00 plus ICANN fee) than the current registry fee. There would be no add-grace period that allows for a full refund of the registration fee.  The name would be fully manageable, but the registration basically is only an option on the name, since the name basically remains available for normal registration at any time.

Type 3 are the normal registrations as they exist now with the only change that at least 90% of a registrar’s registrations need to be kept.

The extensive whitepaper also contains additional details and a FAQ.