La Palabra from Mexico City

Posted March 18th, 2009

Mike Rodenbaugh went to Mexico, paid attention and now he is sharing his thoughts with us. Good thing too. Mike’s a GNSO Councilor and Officer of the Business Constituency.

ICANN held the first of its three 2009 general meetings in Mexico City, from
February 28 to March 6.  More than 1200 people attended, and the prime
topics were new TLDs and trademark protection.

This should be welcome news to many of us who have been arguing for years
that ICANN does little to remedy rampant trademark abuse in existing TLDs.

Responding to voluminous public comments arguing that new TLDs will expand
and facilitate trademark infringement and other abuses of domain names, the
ICANN Staff has essentially delayed the new TLD implementation process for
another six months so that the ICANN community can work on consensus
solutions to these problems.  Applications for new TLDs are not likely to be
accepted until at least January, 2010.  For more info on the new TLD program,
and a link to the ongoing public comment forum closing April 13, go HERE.

The Intellectual Property Constituency of the GNSO will spearhead a newImplementation Recommendation Team of global trademark experts to study thepublic comments and make recommendations to the ICANN community of policychanges designed to mitigate trademark abuse in new TLDs.

Meanwhile the GNSO has recently formed the Regisration Abuse Policies Working Group toexamine broader issues of abuse policies in existing gTLD registrar andregistry contracts, which may recommend policy development that would alsoaffect the new gTLD domain spaces.  For more info on the RAP-WG go HERE. Both groups are expected to report back to the ICANN community in advance of the next ICANN general meeting, in Sydney, Australia from June 20-26, 2009.

Other key developments from Mexico City included further discussion of the
‘fast track’ plan to implement International Domain Names (“IDNs”) in
certain ‘non-contentious’ country code TLDs.  Public comment on the plan is
welcome until April 6th. For more info go HERE.

Also, the GNSO unanimously approved certain changes to the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, providing ICANN Staff with additional enforcement tools to forceregistrars to comply with the RAA terms.  The GNSO also resolved to form a working group to discuss further changes to the RAA.  A public comment forum
is open until April 6th. Go HERE for more info on the RAA amendments.

To participate at ICANN as a member of the trademark and domain name business communities get more info HERE.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in gTLDS, ICANN, Internet Security by Mike Rodenbaugh