Recent Posts
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- Epik to reveal its owners soon
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- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
- Domain universe grows despite .com drag
Advertisers threaten to sue over new gTLDs
The Association of National Advertisers is threatening legal action unless ICANN “abandons” its recently approved new generic top-level domains program.
Its CEO, Robert Liodice, has written to his ICANN counterpart Rod Beckstrom outlining its litany of concerns about new gTLDs.
ANA’s strongly worded arguments will be familiar territory for anyone who has been following development of the program for the last few years.
It’s worried about cybersquatting, typosquatting, phishing, as well as the cost of defensive registrations and post-launch trademark enforcement.
The organization represents 400 companies that collectively spend $250 billion every year on their brands, according to the letter.
It also claims that ICANN shirked its duties by failing to adequately consider the economic impact of the program, and that it failed to develop it in a transparent, bottom-up manner.
Liodice wrote (pdf), with my emphasis:
ICANN must not ignore the legitimate concerns of brand owners and the debilitating effect on consumer protection and healthy markets its unsupervised actions will cause. Should ICANN refuse to reconsider and adopt a program that takes into account the ANA’s concerns expressed in this letter, ICANN and the Program present the ANA and its members no choice but to do whatever is necessary to prevent implementation of the Program and raise the issues in appropriate forums that can consider the wisdom, propriety and legality of the program.
The letter ends with a bunch of legal blah about ANA’s rights and remedies, a pretty obvious indication that it’s considering its legal position.
ICANN should “abandon” the program until ANA’s concerns have been addressed, Liodice wrote.
That’s not going to happen, of course.
There’s no way ICANN can put a halt to the program without basically admitting ANA’s analysis of it has merit.
If ANA wants to stop new gTLDs from going ahead, it’s going to need to do more than send a letter.
The letter is CC’d to the US Department of Commerce and several Congressmen, which suggests that we may see another Congressional hearing into the program before too long.
But will we see a lawsuit as well?
ICANN, at least, has anticipated the likelihood of having to defend itself in court for some time.
About 30% of the the $185,000 application fee – $30 million in a 500-application round – is allocated to various “risks”, of which a legal defense fund is one component.
I’d be surprised if ICANN’s legal team hasn’t war-gamed potential claims and defenses every time the Applicant Guidebook has been updated.
The next five months are going to be very interesting times.
ICANN needs to push through a few non-contentious new gTLD’s in a fasttrack to get things moving.
Maybe some IDN aliases like .ком and .קום for Verisign and .орг for PIR and brands like .canon
Great idea Drewbert!…. and maybe a “good cause” based new TLD like one proposed by http://www.dotgreen.org which is for the benefit of everyone’s common ground, the Earth!