The National Restaurant Association, a trade organization representing more than 970,000 establishments in the restaurant industry, submits this comment because it has concerns about the application of Uniregistry for .RESTAURANT.

The restaurant community takes its reputation seriously. Being linked to Internet mischief such as fraud, cybersquatting, and typosquatting would be detrimental to its reputation. NRA believes that .RESTAURANT should be operated as a community on behalf of entities legitimately associated with the restaurant industry, and the .RESTAURANT registry must be devoted to the betterment of the restaurant industry and its customers. It is doubtful that Uniregistry satisfies such requirements and the granting of its application may be harmful to the restaurant community.

ICANN’s application rules, at §1.2.1 of the Applicant Guidebook, expressly provide that, absent exceptional circumstances, “applications from any entity with or including any individual with convictions or decisions” constituting a pattern of activity including things such as “cybersquatting … reverse domain name hijacking … [or] bad faith” will be “automatically disqualified from the program.”

Even a quick investigation of Uniregistry raises concerns. For example, two of the principals behind Uniregistry are Frank Schilling and John Berryhill. Mr. Schilling has had over 2,000 UDRP cases brought against him. In those actions, his go-to defense appears to be that he did not know about the complainant’s business. Mr. Schilling’s practices may also run afoul of the RAA prohibition of warehousing domain names. Many of Mr. Schilling’s domains have been registered through a company run by Mr. Berryhill, who has been the representative of respondents in over 1,000 UDRP cases. Mr. Berryhill’s go-to defense appears to be accusing the complainant of reverse domain name hijacking. Mr. Berryhill’s involvement with Uniregistry suggests that Uniregistry is preparing for disputes concerning its registry practices.

ICANN should check whether there are additional persons behind Uniregistry with patterns of bad faith Internet practices. Many TLD applicants have created layers and shells to hide participants because their identities, if known, might adversely affect evaluation of their applications. It is clear that entities may not hide backers to evade disqualification. In fact, the rules REQUIRE that a good faith effort be made (§1.2.1(o)) to disclose the principals behind any application (§1.2.1(n)). Investigation of the true identities of those behind this application, including verification of the applicant’s answers to the background questions, could lead to additional findings that the applicant is ineligible to run a registry. ICANN must ensure that the true applicants are properly identified, have clean backgrounds, and have an adequate and credible business plan, satisfying ICANN that Uniregistry will run .RESTAURANT on behalf, and for the enhancement, of the restaurant community. Without such assurances, the application must be rejected.

Uniregistry has submitted 54 applications for new TLDs. As it has applied for a large number of TLDs and its application for .RESTAURANT was not community-based, NRA believes Uniregistry would not have the restaurant community’s best interests in mind in operating .RESTAURANT, but rather might be hoping to stockpile names for resale, to encourage bad faith registrations, and to profit from defensive registrations.

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