[gnso-rpm-wg] Inferences (was Re: Mp3, Attendance, AC recording & AC Chat Review of all Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPMs) PDP Working Group)

Kurt Pritz kurt at kjpritz.com
Thu Jul 13 10:20:59 UTC 2017


I agree with Susan. 

I think the Analysis Group was at least negligent in their duties when they reported the 93% abandonment rate. It was misleading despite the disclaimers attached. Whenever any number is reported, it tends to gain traction and, as a result, we find ourselves struggling to attach some type of meaning to it. The Analysis report has led to false conclusions and a waste of time. 

We are best off never mentioning the number again. We should agree that we have no understanding, information or data on the issue of how abandonment rate was effected by claims notices. 

George has identified a couple ways to approximate the effect. If additional data gathering is undertaken along the lines that George or anyone else suggests, that work would be to get an understanding of abandonment rates and not to test the reported number by Analysis. 

Susan’s last and penultimate paragraphs below put it best. In addition to identifying data be collected in the next round, we could look at the language and display of the current notices to ensure that the notices are designed to achieve the goal of the claims notice program: to properly inform without intimidating. 

Kurt
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Kurt Pritz
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> On Jul 13, 2017, at 10:28 AM, Susan Payne <susan.payne at valideus.com> wrote:
> 
> Correct, the data for two registrars was excluded because of concerns about mining, but Analysis Group clearly were not confident that fully addressed the concern:
> Page 7:
> "However, due to limitations of the data (discussed in more detail below), our analyses of the data require an assumption that each download is associated with a registration attempt (and was not downloaded by a registrar for a purpose unrelated to domain name registrations). If this assumption is incorrect, then our results will exaggerate the size of any observable registration-deterrent Claims Service effect."
>  
> Page 16:
> "These results should not be relied upon to make policy recommendations. We find that the vast majority of registration attempts are not completed after receiving a Claims Service notification (94% abandonment rate). This abandonment rate seems quite high, however there are several caveats to this result, which include our inability to determine the abandonment rate that would occur if no Claims Service notifications were sent and limitations of our data set, which require us to assume that every registrar download from the TMDB represents a registration attempt.54 We therefore cannot determine whether Claims Service notifications are the direct cause for the abandonment rate that we observe."
>  
> I believe this is a fruitless exercise.  Analysis Group are meant to be professionals at this, were paid a tidy sum by ICANN to carry out this review, presumably had the benefit of being an independent third party which ought to have removed some of the confidentiality concerns that we have faced, and should have had the support of whatever ICANN contractual provisions there are requiring co-operation in economic studies.  They still produced a report which repeatedly cites the paucity of data, the resulting reliance on assumptions, and that their “results” were consequently inadequate and should not be relied upon to make policy. 
>  
> We are wasting our time with this.  What would not be a waste of time would be to identify the data that we wish we had and make recommendations such that any future review would not be similarly hampered. 
>  
> Susan Payne
> Head of Legal Policy | Valideus Ltd
>  
> E: susan.payne at valideus.com <mailto:susan.payne at valideus.com>
> D: +44 20 7421 8255
> T: +44 20 7421 8299
> M: +44 7971 661175
>  
>  
> -----Original Message-----
> From: gnso-rpm-wg-bounces at icann.org [mailto:gnso-rpm-wg-bounces at icann.org] On Behalf Of George Kirikos
> Sent: 12 July 2017 21:30
> To: gnso-rpm-wg at icann.org
> Subject: Re: [gnso-rpm-wg] Inferences (was Re: Mp3, Attendance, AC recording & AC Chat Review of all Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPMs) PDP Working Group)
>  
> Hi again,
>  
> Just to followup on my prior email, The Analysis Group *already* adjusted the stats to attempt to take into account the "mining" theory that Jeff spoke about. i.e. the 93.7% abandonment figure that we've been talking about is a figure obtained *after* making the adjustments! Without the adjustment (which eliminated 62.2% of the observations), the abandonment rate would have been 99%! See:
>  
> https://community.icann.org/download/attachments/64066042/Analysis%20Group%20Revised%20TMCH%20Report%20-%20March%202017.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1490349029000&api=v2 <https://community.icann.org/download/attachments/64066042/Analysis%20Group%20Revised%20TMCH%20Report%20-%20March%202017.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1490349029000&api=v2>
>  
> (a) page 17 (footnote 55)
>  
> ""As discussed in Section IV, there are two registrars that averaged downloads of more than 20 trademark strings per download, which is large compared to the average of fewer than five trademark strings in the downloads of other registrars. We also exclude downloads made by ICANN’s monitoring system. The exclusion of the two registrars does not significantly impact our results. Inclusion of the two registrars shows that 99% of registrations are abandoned and 0.5% of completed registrations are disputed."
>  
> (b) page 18, note [2]
>  
> "[2] A bulk download is defined as a download from the TMCH of multiple strings by the same registrar with exactly the same time stamp. Downloads by two registrars are excluded from this analysis because of a potentially high prevalence of bulk downloads (98.7% and 81.9% of downloads, respectively) by each of these two registrars. The average size of the “bulk downloads” by these two registrars (approximately 23 and 35 strings, respectively) is much larger than the average “bulk download” size of other registrars (other registrars in the Claims Service data download 5 strings or less on average).
> This exclusion results in an exclusion of 62.2% of the observations in the original Claims Service data received from IBM after excluding downloads by ICANN's monitoring system."
>  
> Sincerely,
>  
> George Kirikos
> 416-588-0269
> http://www.leap.com/ <http://www.leap.com/>
>  
>  
>  
> On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 4:10 PM, George Kirikos <icann at leap.com <mailto:icann at leap.com>> wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > Just following up on some statements from today's transcript:
> > 
> > On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 3:51 PM, Terri Agnew <terri.agnew at icann.org <mailto:terri.agnew at icann.org>> wrote:
> >> Adobe Connect chat transcript for 12 July 2017:
> > ...
> >>   Jeff Neuman:My belief is that we have a huge rate of people
> >> abandoning is because (i) registrars were mining the system, (ii)
> >> registrants were mining the system to see what was valuable, and to a
> >> lesser extent as a result of the claim (either legitimiate or not)
> >> 
> >>   Jeff Neuman:But I cant prove any of those theories
> >> 
> >>   Kathy Kleiman:@Jeff: we have gathered evidence already from
> >> registries; there is probably more
> >> 
> >>   Jeff Neuman:There just is no way to do so on a backwards basis
> > 
> > If one had access to the raw data (and presumably The Analysis Group
> > would have had it, to generate their reports), one could filter such
> > "mining" by examining abandonment rates by (1) registrar and (2) by
> > time relative to the launch date.
> > 
> > i.e. presumably those were "mining" the system were not spreading out
> > their queries across all registrars equally. It would be easy to
> > identify the outliers. Furthermore, registrants would be also focused
> > on a few registrars that permit those bulk lookups, and they wouldn't
> > spread their queries over time equally --- they'd be focused at the
> > launch (i.e. the beginning, first few days, etc.) of a TLD.
> > 
> > Of course, if need be, one could anonymize the data by registrar (i.e.
> > Registrar 1, Registrar 2, etc.), if there are any concerns about
> > revealing their individual abandonment rates.
> > 
> > Registry operators and registrars both have technology to block WHOIS
> > access to those who are "mining" that data. One can use similar
> > detection techniques in this instance.
> > 
> > Sincerely,
> > 
> > George Kirikos
> > 416-588-0269
> > http://www.leap.com/ <http://www.leap.com/>
> > _______________________________________________
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