Recent Posts
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Wine producers worried about new gTLDs
American vintners are worried that someone might steal their protected regional names in the next new gTLD round.
The Napa Valley Vintners has written to ICANN to “express strong opposition to the creation of any generic top-level domain
(gTLDs) that uses our distinctive name.”
The trade association asks that the names of wine-producing areas of the States be added to the Reserved Names List in the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook.
That list currently is limited to the names of intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, and Red Cross/Crescent related entities.
The NVV points out that the names of wine-producing regions are protected by US law — you can’t say your wine comes from Napa unless it was in fact made there.
According to Wikipedia, there are 276 protected American Viticultural Areas in 34 states. More than half are in California.
Some of these names actually have a small degree of protection already, but only accidentally. The string “Napa” would be considered a protected geographic string until the current AGB rules, for example, but only if somebody wanted to run .napa as a city-gTLD.
The issue of protecting wine-related geographic indicators has come up at ICANN before. While it was processing the applications for .wine and .vin in 2014, there was a protracted bust-up in the Governmental Advisory Committee about whether they should go ahead.
Several European governments pressed ICANN to ban or delay .wine, now an Identity Digital gTLD, until promises were made about protecting names like “Champagne” and “Rioja” at the second level.
France in particular got very pissed off, but ultimately objections were dropped after the registry made some kind of deal with the wine-makers.
The NVV letter is cc’d to the federal government’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, presumably to send the message that the group is not messing about.
The letter (pdf) is addressed to “The Honorable Sally Costerton”, under the apparent assumption that she’s still ICANN’s acting CEO. That hasn’t been true for the last eight months. Also, as lovely as she is, I’m not sure she qualifies for that particular honorific.
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GIs were considered in SubPro WT5, and AGB reflects exactly was decided regarding that.