Why Presumption of Renewal is Unsuitable for the Current Registry Market Structure
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Internet Governance
Padma Venkataraman
29 October 2017
With the recent and much protested renewal of the .net legacy Top-Level-Domain (TLD), the question of the appropriate method of renewal has again come to the forefront. While this seems relatively uncontroversial to most, Padma Venkataraman, a law student and intern at CIS looks at presumptive renewal through a critical lens.
With the recent renewal of the .net legacy Top-Level-Domain (TLD), the question of the appropriate method of renewal is worth reconsidering. When we talk about presumption of renewal for registry agreements, it means that the agreement has a reasonable renewal expectancy at the end of its contractual term. According to the current base registry agreement, it shall be renewed for 10-year periods, upon expiry of the initial (and successive) term, unless the operator commits a fundamental and material breach of the operator’s covenants or breach of its payment obligations to ICANN.