[council] 7 Aug letter from US Senate Judiciary Committee

[Mason Cole]

Alan --

Indeed it's of interest.  As the North American representative for registrars, I am planning to confer with the relevant GAC representatives about the concerns of the Congress (some of which make sense, while others need some help).

I note to the council that the issue of second-level trademark protections has been the most intensively debated and negotiated aspect of the new TLD program and yielded protections exceeding the original expectations of the IP community.  More importantly they far exceed the protections available in existing gTLDs and ccTLDs.

There was an extensive effort to design these protections by the many IP experts participating on the IRT.  The community negotiated and approved the protections in the STI report.  The Board and GAC then re-negotiated these issues prior to the approval of the program.  Calls for even further protections -- before we know if the designed changes are sufficient -- is premature and contributes to the culture of delay that has unfortunately been allowed to grow in this now seven-year effort. 

As I've said before, it's clear where the existing harm has occurred and sometimes continues to occur so a more reasoned effort would be one that addresses harms in existing g/ccTLDs before piling more on to new gTLDs.  I would be interested in the GNSO and ccNSO collaborating on such an effort, without impacting fair use and free speech, and without unreasonably blocking consumers from legitimately accessing name registrations.

I also personally agree with the letter's call for additional resources to be granted to the compliance function -- the RrSG has advocated for this for many years.  In addition to more impactful compliance efforts, there should be a discussion about what ICANN and the community are prepared to do with the results of enhanced compliance.  For example, at times there are calls to simply de-accredit registrars, or cancel the contracts of new registries, without consideration of what happens to consumers' domain names.  On the registrar side, we so far have been fortunate to have other registrars volunteer to pick up the slack (which isn't as easy as it sounds) when a registrar is taken out of the picture, but there's no permanent safety net for such a scenario.

Thanks --

Mason

On Aug 22, 2012, at 1:41 PM, Alan Greenberg wrote:

> 
> Perhaps of interest.
> 
> http://www.icann.org/en/news/correspondence/leahy-et-al-to-atallah-07a ug12-en.pdf
> 
>