[Ws2-jurisdiction] Rec on choice of law

[Thomas Rickert]

Hi all,
sorry I could only join part of the call today. 

Reading the recommendation on choice of law it strikes me odd that for most options disadvantages are explained. Only for the „status quo“ option, an avantage is mentioned. If the group has chosen not to add the advantages I mentioned on the menu option, that is fine. 

Only today I spoke to a company rep at the CENTR meeting in Brussels and mentioned where we stand with the discussion and what I heard is that they had a few interested parties from the Middle East for gTLD applications and they did not move forward because of the US contracts. 

Also, being presented with US legal concepts and contracts based on US law leads to the situation where non-US companies have to ask ICANN for permission to be compliant with their local laws. We have that with Data Retention Waiver requests for registers, the Whois exemption procedure and now with the whole GDPR debate (which I know is broader). I have gone through that on behalf of clients and can tell you that the Data Retention Waiver processes were costly, took a long time and required substantial debate with ICANN’s lawyers. That is not really acceptable and should be changed. A menu option helps with that. Let’s remember, applicants for these waivers were not asking for any privileges other than the privilege of being permitted to be compliant with their local laws and not run the risk of getting breach notices by ICANN.

Best,
Thomas