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Re: [council] 7 Aug letter from US Senate Judiciary Committee
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
>
>
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