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Famous Four says that Demand Media’s .cam should be rejected

Kevin Murphy, September 6, 2013, 18:39:58 (UTC), Domain Policy

Demand Media’s application for .cam should be rejected because it lost a String Confusion Objection filed by .com registry Verisign, according to rival applicant Famous Four Media.
“The process in the applicant guidebook is now clear: AC Webconnecting and dot Agency Limited proceed to resolve the contention set, and United TLD’s application cannot proceed,” chief legal officer Peter Young told DI.
dot Agency is Famous Four’s applicant for .cam, which along with AC Webconnecting survived identical challenges filed by Verisign. United TLD is the applicant subsidiary of Demand Media.
Serious questions were raised about the SCO process after two International Centre for Dispute Resolution panelists reached opposition conclusions in the three .cam/.com cases last month.
Demand Media subsequently called for an ICANN investigation into the process, with vice president Statton Hammock writing:

String confusion objections are meant to be applicant agnostic and have nothing to do with the registration or use of the new gTLD.

However, Famous Four thinks it has found a gotcha in a letter (pdf) written by a lawyer representing Demand which opposed consolidation of the three .cam cases, which stated:

Consolidation has the potential to prejudice the Applicants if all Applicants’ arguments are evaluated collectively, without regard to each Applicant’s unique plan for the .cam gTLD and their arguments articulating why such plans would not cause confusion.

In other words, Demand argued that the proposed usage of the TLD should be taken into account before the ICDR panel ruled against it, and now it saying usage should not have been taken into account.
Famous Four’s Young said:

Whether or not one ascribes to the view that usage should not be taken into account, and we believe that it should (otherwise we would not have argued it), the fact is that United TLD were very explicit prior to the publication that usage should indeed be taken into account.

The SCO debate expanded yesterday when the GNSO Council spent some time discussing .cam and other SCO discrepancies during its regular monthly meeting.
Concerns are such that the Council intends to inform the ICANN board of directors and its New gTLD Program Committee that it is looking into the issue.
The NGPC, has “Update on String Similarity” on its agenda for a meeting on Tuesday, which will no doubt try to figure out what, if anything, needs to be done.

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Comments (4)

  1. Rubens Kuhl says:
    September 6, 2013 at 6:56 pm

    It’s not only United TLD position that prevented consolidation; Verisign objection mentioned “overlapping marketing channels”, which could be potentially different among the applicants of a contention set.
    Anyway, I agree with FF reading of the guidebook, and I can’t see ICANN doing anything different than allowing FF and AC Webconnecting to proceed to contention set resolution.
    The .cam contention set was dissenting from the beginning, as ACW filed LROs against the two other applicants, and when VRSN came to haunt them, even then they preferred not to fight a single fight.

    Reply
  2. Wendy McDee says:
    September 6, 2013 at 8:14 pm

    After this, can we all finally agree that this gtld idea is stupid and will crash and burn in a mushroom cloud?

    Reply

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