We are in the process of starting our own trade group. More information will be released as we move forward.

http://www.thedomains.com/2008/10/07/kentucky-hearing-held-today/

The only one ranting is you and you’re all over the map with falsehoods I won’t even begin to get into because I don’t even know who you are. Why bother, just to feed your complex? Let your opinion be known. Shout it out as loud as you like, it’s your right.

No one’s going to take you seriously until you step out from behind the shadows and be a man. Seriously “dude”.

Dude, now you are way, way over the top. Once again, its not the ICA’s job to help you or anyone else find buyers for their names. Take responsibility and do it yourself; there are dozens of auctions, forums, blogs, Ebay etc to sell names. No excuses! And wait, you did not have 7 dollars to renew a name?? (You not only had a legal problem, you had logic, math, and priority problems too.) And now you “blame” respected domain owners for “taking advantage” of you including one who even donated what he paid for?? Un-freaking real.

As a now revealed non-paying ICA member, you are already in debt–the ICA leader took time (time = money) to address your rant. So you got something for nothing. This is the week of monetary bailouts, so I guess everyone feels entitled to something now. I’ve truly seen it all now….

“not many trusted the ICA then”. Yet another totally random act of unsupported nonsense. Speak for yourself dude.

This topic of the ICA not funding an individual member keeps coming up here but it’s an issue I never raised and I have also clarified that. Michael C., you told me that same thing on the very first phone conversation we ever had back in mid 2007 and at that time I concurred. I’ve always understood that and the fact is we never directly asked the ICA for any funding. We asked for support to raise awareness of our case to the public at large as we felt the ICA was best suited for that, and you did that in the beginning. You also put the word out that we were attempting to raise funds for the case. In return for that we agreed to let the ICA use our case as a means to promote new membership in the ICA.

You yourself said at one point to me that you couldn’t find anyone within the ICA to purchase our names to raise funds. Yet, some of the same members of the ICA chose to take advantage of our legal struggle and pick up some of our names on the drop. One was even auctioned off to raise funds back for the ICA. Now that’s pretty nefarious by any measure. We found out from many outside domain owners that they wouldn’t help simply because they felt the ICA was directly involved. Not many trusted the ICA back then. After all that we experienced we understood at least some of that frustration.

We had plenty of support for our case though, from phone calls, to emails, to posts on our blog and forums. The fact is there were only a handful who were not. At one point we even had a second lawyer helping our case pro bono. Trying to perpetuate the latter is irresponsible.

Removing our article from the ICA website during our case, without even telling us, and then saying you couldn’t fit it on the new site is ridiculous. The
fact is our article, which was more than just asking for help, was the only article not moved to the new site. I checked for that at the time when it occurred
and I had to contact you to find out why it happened. Hell, I would have been fine if you simply pushed it over to the forums on the ICA site. But, you didn’t even do that.

See, what I believe is that our case served its purpose for you and your push to increase membership and when things started looking tight for us you decided the well ran dry and you pulled the ICA away. Well, you pulled back too soon because even though we can’t discuss the settlement (NDA) I can tell you we did alright in the end, no thanks to the ICA. Just go to the USPTO site and look at the filings there. The PTO clearly shows their position on the matter and that was the biggest help.

Use and trademark your best domains people. Investing your hard earned money in that will go farther than anything else in protecting your domain names.

I am sorry that you are disappointed in the level of support that you received from ICA and from its members. However, as Michael Berkins clearly explained, we do not offer a legal defense fund as a membership benefit. We have to pick battles that impact the industry as a whole. We devote our limited resources to a few precedent setting cases.

You benefited by my most passionate plea for help. Not before or since have I asked by email and in an article published on InternetCommerce.org for members to consider helping someone with their legal expenses. Unfortunately, your case did not receive a sympathetic audience. The article was removed months after it was published during a website rebuild. Copying articles from the old site was a laborous process due to formatting problems. I made the decision to pick the most historically valuable articles to carry over to the new website. The article asking members to support your defense was not copied to the new site.

Michael Berkins is a Gold Member and someone who provides extremely valuable input on a regular basis, but he does not get special consideration for the expenditure of association funds. I am sure that if you paid attention to this blog, you would know that he was recently very disappointed in a decision that ICA made about an issue that he wanted us to take up. Despite his great contributions to ICA, both financially and of his time, the decision of the Board went differently than he desired and expected.

We are making progress in improving transparency and in bring more diversity to the ICA Board. Michael has been a great help in that regard and I thank him. Please contact me at http://internetcommerce.org/contact_us if you would like to serve our industry by participating in ICA leadership.

Michael, my respect for you is increased even more today as I read how you still call pasionately for your readers to support ICA inspite of past dissapointment on ICA position on an issue that was important to you personally.

I actually have been pushing the ICA to open up more board sets to all members, regardless of their level of membership and they agreed to do it.

Now as they discussed at the TRAFFIC show they are looking for domainers from all membership levels to step up, volunteer their time and take a leadership role in the ICA.

Any takers?

First thing, get rid of membership rankings. Members support with what they can. That whole idea of a member site logo is an idea I gave Michael during our case but I never suggested it be used in that way. It ends up creating a class system within the organization.

Second, set up a forum on the ICA site that is open to everyone and be active in it. There’s less than a dozen posts there since it was set up. Not very transparent from the ICA nor its membership base.

Lastly, if the issue of funds is so important to Michael and anyone else on the paid staff with the ICA then get an outside job and donate their time and money to the group. Isn’t that what they expect everyone else to do?

“”"I’m certain you’re safe with the ICA, you’re a Gold member”"”

During this year I have bought some personal issues to the ICA including the Tucows problem I discussed publicly.

The ICA voted against me on that.

I voiced an opinion that registrars should not be able to hold on to the expired domains of their customers to the ICA.

The ICA didn’t vote my way.

So why do I still support the ICA?

We need it.

If you have a better alternative I will consider it.

But as we sit here today with CADNA trying to get a bill to passed, which will negatively effect every domain owner; States taking domains away from their owners with no notice or hearing; Hundreds of new domain extensions coming, we need representation.

It’s just that simple.

The issue is bigger than just you.

The issue is bigger than just me.