dotPH

Excerpts from the article are in italics.

'Disini is expected to submit to the government agency a set of policies in relation to the administration of the ".ph" domain in compliance with the new government rules.'

Unfortunately, Mr. Pena and Sarmiento have chosen to create their guidelines without seeking any input or clarification from us. If they did, they would have found that a lot of the "changes" they would like to see in the PH domain have been implemented a long time ago. Our policies have, for the last 5 years, been posted on our website at www.domains.ph. These include:

• Domain Name Service Agreement
• General Policies
• Term of Domain Name Service and Renewal Policy
• Domain Name Registration/Applicant Information Policy
• Uniform Dispute Resolution Implementation Rules
• Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy
• ICANN vs dotPH UDRP
• Approved Providers for Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy

'However, three months after the guideline is out, government is expecting Disini to either choose to relinquish one of his roles of either being the administrator of the domain name or being the owner of a registrar of the ".ph" domain in the country.'

We believe what the PDI article meant to say is that Mr. Pena wants us to choose between running the Registry or the Registrar service.

Unfortunately, doing this is highly irregular (I can only think of one country where the Registar business was spun off - New Zealand.) In almost all other countries, the Registry also acts as a Registrar - it is the more efficient way to operate, it is the natural way to run a domain (especially a small domain like PH), and the most conducive to innovation.

Spinning off the dotPH Registrar business will result in costs to the local Registry, existing Registrars and PH domain owners. There's a good chance the Registrar business would be sold to an foreign entity like Network Solutions (US), or as in the case of NZ, Melbourne IT (Australia). I find it hard to understand why Mr. Pena would want to implement a solution that is clearly detrimental to PH yet could be favorable to foreign businesses.

dotPH, is in fact, a world-class Registrar. Our technology is currently being used in other countries such as New Zealand. Our ad campaigns have won international recognition in Cannes, France. Our service has been hailed by top officials in companies such as Verisign (the dominant COM Registry), which remains a client of ours to this day.

I am not sure if Mr. Pena understands the intricacies of how a Registrar or Registry is operated, and I am concerned that decisions are being made on such a complicated matter w/o the feedback of people who understand these intricacies.

This policy is consistent with the previous position of the local Internet community that the domain is a national patrimony, and therefore the domain should represent the country domain for the Philippines, just as ".uk" is for United Kingdom or ".ws" for Western Samoa.

Disini, the current administrator of the ".ph" Internet domain, has tried marketing the domain to stand for the word "phone." He, however, faced stiff opposition from local parties so he eventually dropped the idea for the meantime.

There is a misconception that the PH domain was being marketeted as the domain for "phone" companies or Telcos. In truth, DotPH was developing SMS-based technology (eg "Text") that works with the Domain Name System. Since the Philippines is the SMS capital of the world, it only makes sense that technologies that marry SMS and DNS be developed here, hence the DotPHone concept.

It would have benefited the millions of SMS users in the Philippines by making the Internet much more accessible. Unfortunately, the reaction was quite hysterical in some quarters. It's unfortunate we think, that this technology has not been allowed to sink or swim on its own merits. We feel it would have heightened the Philippine's reputation as a center for SMS-based innovations.

The new rules also stressed that there should only be one registry, but multiple "registrars" would be encouraged to facilitate competition.

dotPH has over 150 Registrars. Most of these Registrars have been with us for years.

However, it stated that all new policies that the administrators want to implement should first go through a public consultation, and are then submitted to a government authority 30 days before it is enforced. The new policies are required to be published on the Internet.

Since late 2001, dotPH has gone through a public consultation process that is conducted on our website. See previous discussions

Our online consultation process is very similar to the way in which ICANN conducts its consultation with the global Internet Community.

dotPH is actually a "policy - light" domain. This means that domains are registered on a first-come, first-served basis, and there are very few requirements or restrictions imposed on registrants. This allows domain registration to be instantaneous, and helps keep prices competitive.

The new ".ph" domain guidelines also stressed that the administrator should practice "fairness" to all eligible registrants that request domain names. Policies on who should be able to use this domain name must be made transparent and non-discriminatory, it added.

We have repeatedly asked Mr. Ver Pena and Mr. George Sarmiento for feedback on any problem that they have ever heard about dotPH. And they have repeatedly been unable to come up with any problem. Mr. Pena and Sarmiento have never mentioned to us an instance when dotPH has been "unfair" with a registrant, or when policies have been discriminatory or not transparent. (All our policies are on our website, and all registrations are automated; hence it is very hard to see how "fairness" has become an issue.)

If this is not correct, we would like to request Mr. Pena and Mr. Sarmiento to kindly and categorically state the problems that have encountered with the PH Domain. If no problems can be found, then what problems are the new guidelines intended to fix?

The ".ph" domain administrator is expected to publish policies on domain dispute resolutions in collaboration with the local Internet community. However, the administrator would not make any judgments in disputes between third parties and domain name registrants.

The new guideline said that a relevant government agency or public authority would be tasked to come up with a model on how to resolve domain disputes in the country.

The Uniform Dispute Resolution Policies have been published on our website for the last 3 years.

dotPH was one of the first ccTLDs to implement a dispute resolution policy. This is an innovative policy as it allows domain disputes to be settled in 2 months. (Compare this with the speed with which domain disputes are resolved in Philippine courts - the ongoing pldt.com dispute has been in court for the last 4 years.)