Governments to focus on new gTLDs during ICANN’s new eight-day Toronto meeting

ICANN may have received a bit of flak for cancelling Fridays earlier this year, but as it turns out ICANN meetings are getting longer, not shorter.
The recently published schedule for next month’s Toronto meeting covers eight days, from Friday October 12 to Friday October 19.
The official start of the event will as always be on the Monday (with the work really starting on the Saturday) and the official end will be on Thursday for the second time in a row.
But this time there’s also going to be some special-interest sessions on both Fridays too.
In a change to the usual order of things, the Governmental Advisory Committee has scrapped some of its meetings with other ICANN advisory committees and supporting organizations.
Instead, word is that the GAC plans to focus almost entirely on developing its new gTLD Early Warnings — preliminary warnings about objectionable applications — during the Toronto meeting.
It’s replacing its smaller inter-committee sessions with a one-off High-Level Meeting with SO and AC heads, which we understand is designed to bring newly participating governments up to speed on how ICANN works.
Should we expect to see a bigger GAC in Toronto, now that governments have the opportunity to start complaining about specific applications? It certainly seems possible.

Tonkin says better new gTLD trademark protections could come in the first round

Groups pushing for stronger new gTLD trademark protection mechanisms could get some of their wishes if they present a unified, coherent position to ICANN.
That’s according to Melbourne IT chief strategy officer and ICANN vice chairman Bruce Tonkin, speaking to DI today about the company’s trademarks summit in Washington DC last week.
Tonkin said that the event identified five rough areas of consensus about changes to rights protection mechanisms, at least two of which could be made before new gTLDs start to go live (which he expects to happen in the fourth quarter of 2013).
The Business Constituency, IP Constituency and so-called “brand summit” are now talking about their areas of common ground and are expected to continue the conversation at the ICANN meeting in Toronto next month.
One area of apparent agreement is an extension to the Trademark Claims service – which alerts trademark owners when somebody registers a domain matching their mark – beyond the 60 days mandated by the Applicant Guidebook.
Trademark interests want the service made permanent, because cybersquatters don’t suddenly stop registering infringing domain names 60 days after a TLD hits general availability.
ICANN has resisted this change, as CEO Fadi Chehade explained last week, largely because several companies already offer commercial trademark watch services.
Many registries and registrars are also against such a move due to the potential cost considerations.
However, Tonkin does not appear to be convinced by either argument.
“Even though a single gTLD might be for 60 days, gTLDs will launch at a range of different times over a number of years. Registries and registrars will have to support that process over a couple of years,” he said. “The cost to industry to extend it over 60 days isn’t that high.”
While supporting the extension may seem like an own goal for Melbourne IT – one of the companies already selling brand monitoring services – Tonkin is not too concerned about losing business.
The value of such services is in the added intelligence, such as monitoring the usage of infringing domains and recommending recovery strategies, he said, not just supplying lists of domains.
“Just that raw data isn’t especially beneficial,” he said.
There’s also no service on the market today that, like Trademark Claims, alerts registrants about third-party trademark rights at the point of registration, Tonkin noted.
Extending Trademark Claims could be seen as a matter of implementation, rather than policy, and may be one of the easiest goals for the trademark community to achieve.
“With enough community support, GNSO advice or ALAC advice could be presented to the board, which could make changes to the Applicant Guidebook,” Tonkin said.
“But I think the board would be reluctant to do that unless it saw very clear support from the community,” he added.
A faster, cheaper Uniform Rapid Suspension system is something that could also be made to happen via “implementation” tweaks, he indicated.
Trademark owners are looking for URS to be priced in the $300-$500 range, which WIPO and the National Arbitration Forum don’t think is feasible the way it is currently structured.
ICANN plans to issue a Request For Proposals soon, according to chief of strategy Kurt Pritz, in order to see if any other provider can do it more cheaply, however.
Another request from trademark holders, to do registrant identity checking — such as email authentication — could be handled via the ongoing Registrar Accreditation Agreement talks, Tonkin suggest.
But other emerging consensus areas would be more suited to a full GNSO Policy Development Process, he said.
The IP community wants the Trademark Clearinghouse to include not only exact matches of their trademarks, but also mark+keyword records (such as googlesearch.tld or paypalpayments.tld).
While there’s agreement in principle among these constituencies, there are still some differences in the details, however.
Some say that the keywords should be limited to words included in the trademark registration, while others believe that mark+keywords won in UDRP cases should be included.
If the former approach is used, domains such as paypal-support.tld, to borrow the example repeatedly used at last week’s summit, would probably not be protected.
Tonkin said that last week’s summit seemed to produce agreement that an algorithmic approach would be too complex, and would generate far to many false positives, to be effective.
A PDP would also be likely be required to find agreement on a mandatory “blocking” system, along the lines of what ICM Registry created for its Sunrise B, Tonkin said.
The problem with PDPs is that they take a long time, and it’s very unlikely that they could produce results in time for the first new gTLD launches.
Tonkin, however, suggested that moving forward with a PDP would create a strong incentive for new gTLD registries to create and adhere to voluntary best practices.
He pointed out that many applicants plan to bring in stronger rights protection mechanisms than ICANN requires already.
While Tonkin is vice chairman of ICANN’s board, he’s not involved in any new gTLD decisions or discussions due to his conflict of interest as a senior executive at a major registrar.

Delaware secretary of state opposes any corporate-themed new gTLDs

The secretary of state for Delaware has come out in opposition to new gTLD applications such as .inc, .corp and .ltd.
Jeff Bullock filed the comments with ICANN today, despite having previously suggested that some applications might have sufficient restrictions to make them acceptable.
Bullock wrote (emphasis added):

none of the applications contains a fully thought out, achievable, transparent and enforceable system for fully safeguarding that a firm remains legally registered with a company registry at all times.
…
none of the applications adequately safeguards consumers, legitimate businesses, the public at large, state regulators, and the internet itself from the risks that “company endings” are used for fraudulent or misleading purposes.
Therefore, at this stage of the gTLD process, I strongly believe that the public is best served if these company endings are not made available for use. There is no overriding public policy purpose or strong business case for making them available and the opportunity for fraud and abuse is very high.

There are a few dozen corporate-themed gTLD applications, including contests for: .inc, .corp, .llp, .ltd, .company and .gmbh.
Back in March, before any of the applications had been published, Bullock and other secretaries of state said that such gTLDs should only be approved with “restrictions that would attempt to protect legitimate businesses and consumers from confusion or fraud.”
His letter suggested that DOT Registry’s proposals might be adequate, but he’s apparently changed his mind after reading the applications.
Based on the March letters, I’d say there’s a strong possibility of objections being filed against some or all of these applications.
Delaware is of course the state most big US companies choose to register themselves in, due to its generous company laws.

New ICANN chief pours cold water on new gTLD trademark protection demands

Some of the enhanced trademark protection mechanisms being discussed currently by the IP lobby seem unlikely to be adopted by ICANN any time soon, if a response to Congress from new CEO Fadi Chehadé is any guide.
In a letter published tonight, Chehadé appears to rule out both the inclusion of ‘brand+keyword’ records in the Trademark Clearinghouse and an extension of the Trademark Claims service beyond 60 days.
These are two of the common demands to emerge recently from ICANN’s Business Consituency, Intellectual Property Constituency, and the so-called “brand summit” proposal.
The Chehadé letter was sent yesterday to the chairs and ranking members of the Judiciary Committees of both the House and Senate, in response to their August 7 letter.
On extending the Trademark Claims service — which alerts trademark owners when somebody registers a domain exactly matching their mark — beyond the current 60 days, he wrote:

For the first round of new gTLDs, ICANN is not in a position to unilaterally require today an extension of the 60-day minimum length of the trademark claims service. The 60-day period was reached through a multi-year, extensive process with the ICANN community. One reason for this is that there are existing IP Watch services that address this needs. Those community members that designed the Trademark Claims process were cognizant of existing protections and sought to fill gaps, not replace existing services and business models.

While this obviously does not rule out an extension of Trademark Claims, it’s pretty clear from the letter that ICANN has no plans to do so without some form of community consent.
On the matter of brand+keyword protections, seen by the trademark community as a crucial component of a strong anti-cybersquatting regime, Chehadé wrote:

It is important to note that the Trademark Clearinghouse is intended be a repository for existing legal rights, and not an adjudicator of such rights or creator of new rights. Extending the protections offered through the Trademark Clearinghouse to any form of name (such as the mark + generic term suggested in your letter) would potentially expand rights beyond those granted under trademark law and put the Clearinghouse in the role of making determinations as to the scope of particular rights.

He goes on to say that providing enhanced rights protection mechanisms is optional for new gTLD registries and may be one way that they can competitively differentiate themselves.
Indeed, large applicants such as Donuts, Uniregistry and Google say they will offer RPMs that go above and beyond what is required by ICANN.
Extended trademark claims and the brand+keyword protections are two of the changes to the current proposed mesh of mechanisms that the trademark community has found common ground on recently.
At the Melbourne IT trademark summit in Washington DC earlier this week, these two areas were among those that appeared to have the most consensus.
However, applicants for mass-market gTLDs are fervently opposed to changes being made to the Applicant Guidebook at this late stage.
Jon Nevett, co-founder of Donuts, said at the Melbourne IT event that “the Applicant Guidebook at this point should be deemed closed”.
He pointed out that, having paid ICANN about $350 million in application fees, applicants should be considered contracted parties and have their expectations respected.

Consumer Watchdog slams “outrageous” Google and Amazon keyword gTLD bids

Consumer Watchdog, a California-based consumer rights advocacy group, has attacked Google and Amazon’s new gTLD applications in a letter to an influential senator.
The organization has asked Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, to “thwart” the “outrageous” plans for single-registrant dictionary-word gTLDs.
Google and Amazon have separately applied for dozens of gTLDs — such as .music, .blog and .book — that they would exclusively use to market their own products and services.
Consumer Watchdog said in its letter (pdf):

If these applications are granted, large parts of the Internet would be privatized. It is one thing to own a domain associated with your brand, but it is a huge problem to take control of generic strings. Both Google and Amazon are already dominant players on the Internet. Allowing them further control by buying generic domain strings would threaten the free and open Internet that consumers rely upon. Consumer Watchdog urges you to do all that you can to thwart these outrageous efforts and ensure that the Internet continues its vibrant growth while serving the interests of all of its users.

As we reported yesterday, a number of domain name industry participants are planning to complain to ICANN about these applications on pretty much the same grounds.

Industry objection forming to Google and Amazon’s keyword gTLD land grab

Members of the domain name industry, led by Michele Neylon of Blacknight, plan to complain to ICANN about dozens of single-registrant new gTLD applications filed by Google and Amazon.
The signatories of a new letter are bothered by plans by these companies and others to hold dictionary word gTLDs for their own exclusive use, not allowing regular internet users to register domains.
While the letter does not call out applicants by name, it specifically mentions .blog, .music and .cloud as examples of potentially objectionable single-registrant gTLDs.
Google has applied for .blog and .cloud for its own use, among many others. Amazon has done the same for .cloud and .music and dozens of others. All three are heavily contested.
The letter is so far signed by 13 people, many of whom work for registrars. It states in part:

generic words used in a generic way belong to all people. It is inherently in the public interest to allow access to generic new gTLDs to the whole of the Internet Community, e.g., .BLOG, .MUSIC, .CLOUD. Allowing everyone to register and use second level domain names of these powerful, generic TLDs is exactly what we envisioned the New gTLD Program would do. In contrast, to allow individual Registry Operators to segregate and close-off common words for which they do not possess intellectual property rights in effect allows them to circumvent nation-states’ entrenched legal processes for obtaining legitimate and recognized trademark protections.

The ICANN Applicant Guidebook gives certain special privileges to single-registrant gTLDs.
In its discretion, ICANN can release such registries from the Code of Conduct, which obliges them to treat all accredited registrars on a non-discriminatory basis.
The condition for this exception is that “all domain name registrations in the TLD are registered to, and maintained by, Registry Operator for its own exclusive use”.
The measure was designed to capture dot-brand gTLDs such as .google and .amazon, where only the registry itself controls the second-level domain names.
But Google seems to want to benefit from the exception to the Code of Conduct while still offering second-level domains for use by its customers, at least in some applications.
In its .blog application, for example, it states:

Charleston Road Registry [the applying Google subsidiary] intends to apply for an exemption to ICANN’s Registry Operator Code of Conduct and operate the proposed gTLD with Google as the sole registrar and registrant. The proposed gTLD will specifically align with Blogger, an existing Google product, and will provide users with improved capabilities that meet their diverse needs.
The specialization goal of the proposed gTLD is to provide a dedicated second-level domain space for the management of a userʹs Blogger account.

However, the same application also states:

The mission of the proposed gTLD is to provide a dedicated domain space in which users can publish blogs. All registered domains in the .blog gTLD will automatically be delegated to Google DNS servers, which will in turn provide authoritative DNS responses pointing to the Google Blogger service. The mission of the proposed gTLD is to simplify the Blogger user experience. Users will be able to publish content on a unique .blog domain (e.g., myname.blog) which will serve as a short and memorable URL for a particular Blogger account.

“Google want .blog to be only for Blogspot users, which is insane,” Neylon told DI. “No one company should have control of a generic name space like that.”
“The new TLD project spent thousands of hours working on protecting IP rights, and then you get big companies blatantly abusing the system,” he said.
It’s not at all clear whether Google’s plan for .blog is a permitted use case. Does Google’s plan for .blog and other gTLDs mean third parties will be “controlling” and/or “using” .blog domains?
Or is its plan more akin to a dot-brand offering its customers vanity URLs, such as kevin.barclays or john.citi?
I err to the former interpretation.
When a new gTLD applicant asked ICANN for clarity on this matter last December, ICANN’s response was:

“Exclusive use” has its common meaning. The domain name must be exclusively used by the Registry Operator, and no unaffiliated (using the definition of “Affiliate” in the Registry Agreement) third-party may have control over the registration or use of the domain name.

Neylon said he plans to send the letter to ICANN management, board and new gTLD program Independent Objector next week. There’s no target number of signatures.

ICANN plans meeting on URS amid calls for RFP

ICANN wants to try to put the unresolved issues surrounding the Uniform Rapid Suspension system to bed and is planning a meeting in a couple of weeks time to solicit community input.
According to an email from chief of strategy Kurt Pritz to the GNSO Council and At-Large Advisory Committee, ICANN plans to hold a webinar, with a possible face-to-face option, in about two weeks.
The aim is to sort out the problems with URS, which was originally conceived as a faster, cheaper version of UDRP for clear-cut cases of cybersquatting that don’t require much thought to decide.
It’s currently neither fast enough for the trademark lobby’s liking, nor as cheap as ICANN had hoped.
ICANN had targeted a $300 to $500 fee to file URS complaints, but following conversations with the World Intellectual Property Organization and National Arbitration Forum it realized that the true cost was likely to be as much as triple that amount, more in line with UDRP fees.
The higher than expected costs are largely due to the additional registrant protections that were negotiated into the URS procedure over the last few years, which complicate matters.
At a session at the ICANN meeting in Prague this June, community members tried to figure out ways to make URS cheaper without compromising these protections.
Pritz’s email suggested that some of these ideas might work, but others might run counter to established policy.
Many parties on both side of the fence are coming to the realization that unless URS is in place, new gTLD registries that are contractually obliged to abide by it may not be able to launch.
Yesterday, at Melbourne IT’s summit on trademark protection in Washington DC, there were some calls for ICANN to just issue a request for proposals and see which provider offers the best price.
There are plenty of UDRP lawyers/panelists who believe URS cases can easily be handled in 15 minutes at $200, assuming most of the process is automated and the complaints are kept to a word limit.

Nuclear Iran campaign group sends ICANN list of demands (and they’re really, really stupid)

The campaign group United Against Nuclear Iran has called on ICANN to switch off internet access to Iran, due to an apparent misunderstanding of what it is ICANN does.
In a letter sent earlier this month and published yesterday, UANI told ICANN to “immediately cease and desist” from providing “ICANN/IANA access” to Iranian entities covered by US and EU sanctions.
The group is worried that these organizations are using the internet to help Iran with its goal of creating nuclear weapons.
The letter states:

Absent access to ICANN/IANA, the dictatorial regime of Iran would be severely impeded in pursuing its illegal and amoral activities. For each day that you knowingly continue to provide Iran sanction-designated persons and entities access to the worldwide web, ICANN/IANA will be increasingly complicit in the IRGC and Iranian regime’s nefarious behavior. ICANN/IANA must stop transacting with such Iranian entities and persons and deny them access to Unique Web Identifiers, and therefore, the worldwide web.”

The letter is stupid on so many levels it’s difficult to know where to begin.
It appears to assume that ICANN has the power and ability to shut down certain individual .ir and .com domain names, which are registered to and used by sanctioned entities.
The letter (pdf) states:

Prominent sanction-designated Iranian entities have acquired .ir Unique Internet Identifiers from ICANN/IANA through the RIPE NCC. For example, Iran’s nuclear brain trust, Malek Ashtar University holds the http://www.mut.ac.ir/ address. Major Iranian banks, including the country’s central bank, maintain active websites (e.g. http://www.cbi.ir, http://www.bank-maskan.ir, http://www.bmi.ir and http://www.banksepah.ir). Further, Khatam al-Anbia, which serves as the IRGC’s engineering arm with over 812 subsidiaries and is heavily involved in the construction of the Qom/Fordow nuclear weapons facilities, holds the web address of http://www.khatam.com. These sanction-designated entities could not gain such web access without ICANN/IANA.

You’ll immediately notice that UANI seems to think that RIPE NCC hands out .ir addresses, which it does not. RIPE is a Regional Internet Registry that deals exclusively with IP address blocks.
ICANN doesn’t have the power to shut down individual domains either. It has powers over the root zone — top-level domains — not second-level domains in individual TLDs.
Nor does ICANN appear to work with any of the organizations on the US list of sanctioned entities.
The .ir ccTLD is delegated to the Tehran-based Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, which is not sanctioned.
ICANN could, feasibly, shut down the whole of .ir, as long as Verisign and the US Department of Commerce — which have ultimate control over the root — played along, but that seems like overkill.
Is UANI asking ICANN to shut down the whole of the .ir space?
Apparently not. In fact, the group condemns censorship and appears to support the ability of regular Iranian citizens to access a free, unfettered internet. The letter states:

Unfortunately, ICANN/IANA and the Unique Internet Identifiers that it provides are misused by the sanction-designated Iranian entities and persons to facilitate their illicit operations, activities and communications including support for Iran’s rogue nuclear weapons program, Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism around the world, and the Iranian regimes brutal crackdown against its own people. Disturbingly, that crackdown includes the ruthless censorship of the Internet and other communication access, and the use of tracking technology to monitor, torture and kill freedom seeking dissidents.
…
Simply put, ICANN/IANA should not provide the internet communications means that the Iranian regime and the IRGC misuses to censor and deny Internet freedoms to its people, much less to support Iran’s illicit nuclear program or its sponsorship of terrorism.

A second, more or less identical letter (pdf) sent to RIPE NCC accused the organization of being the country-code manager for .ir, apparently based on a misunderstanding of this web page.
Netherlands-based RIPE has already responded, saying:

The RIPE NCC is in contact with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ensure that we operate in accordance with Dutch law and all applicable international sanctions. Our advice from the Ministry has been that the RIPE NCC is not in violation of these sanctions. However, we will investigate in cases where new information is provided to us and we will ensure that changing circumstances do not place the RIPE NCC in violation of sanctions.

UANI could have avoided embarrassing itself with a couple of phone calls, and I have to wonder why it did not.
Possibly because it can get New York Times column inches simply by throwing around accusations.

Whacky lawsuit targets ICANN, eNom, CentralNic, NetSol, Verisign

ICANN and several domain name companies have been slapped with a bizarre, virtually incomprehensible anti-cybersquattng lawsuit in Virginia.
Canadian Graham Schreiber, registrant of landcruise.com, has beef primarily with CentralNic — the UK-based company that sells third-levels domains under us.com, uk.com and the like — and one of its customers.
As far as I can tell, the complainant, who’s representing himself pro se, has issues with CentralNic’s entire business model. Here’s his complaint (pdf).
He discovered that a British individual named Lorraine Dunabin — who has a UK trademark on the word Landcruise — had registered both landcruise.co.uk and landcruise.uk.com.
Having failed to take the .co.uk using Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service (repeatedly referred to in the complaint as UDRP), Schreiber has instead filed this lawsuit to accuse Dunabin of “Dilution, Infringement [and] Passing off” by registering the .uk.com.
CentralNic is named because it owns .uk.com and various other geographic pseudo-gTLDs, which Schreiber says “dilute the integrity of .com” and amount to a “shakedown”.
Verisign is named as a contributory infringer because it runs .com. Network Solutions and eNom are named because they manage uk.com and landcruise.uk.com respectively as registrars.
ICANN is named because… I don’t know. I think it’s because all of the other companies are ICANN contractors.
ICANN, which has a web page for the litigation here, has already filed a motion to dismiss (pdf).
Schreiber is seeking monetary damages from all of the defendants, most of which he wants donated to the Rotary Club.

ICANN sets deadline to sort out Olympic shambles

ICANN’s board of directors has set itself a deadline to come to a decision on special new gTLD protections for the International Olympic Committee and Red Cross.
It’s looking rather like the IOC, Red Cross and Red Crescent are going to get more of the concessions they’ve been asking for for the last few years, including protection at the second level.
In a resolution passed last week, the ICANN board urged the Generic Names Supporting Organization to make recommendations before January 31 next year, and indicated that it would take matters into its own hands if GNSO consensus cannot be found.

Resolved, the Board thanks the GNSO for its continued attention and ongoing work on this topic, and requests that the GNSO continue its work on a policy recommendation on second-level protections for the IOC and Red Cross/Red Crescent names on an expedited basis.
Resolved (NG2012.09.13.01), if it is not possible to conclude the policy work prior to 31 January 2013, the Board requests that the GNSO Council advise the Board by no later than that date if it is aware of any reason, such as concerns with the global public interest or the security or stability of the DNS, that the Board should take into account in making its decision about whether to include second level protections for the IOC and Red Cross/Red Crescent names

The GNSO has a working group looking at the problem, which is currently deciding whether to recommend starting a formal Policy Development Process.
Given that new gTLDs are expected to start launching in less than a year, and given that PDPs take forever to wrap up, if they ever do, it’s also trying to decide whether to recommend that the IOC/RC/RC marks should be protected in the interim.
Exact matches of the Olympic and Red Cross names, as well as a limited number of translations, would be “reserved” or otherwise removed from sale by each new gTLD registry.
The ICANN board appears to be leaning towards granting these interim protections. In last week’s resolution, it stated:

the Board favors a conservative approach, that restrictions on second-level registration can be lifted at a later time, but restrictions cannot be applied retroactively after domain names are registered.

The IOC/RC/RC debate has been going on since June 2011, when the ICANN board gave the organizations temporary top-level protection in new gTLDs and then passed the hot potato to the GNSO.
The GNSO working group tasked with sorting through the resulting policy mess was subsequently hindered by procedural posturing and acrimony at the Council level and an unreceptive board.
There’s a parallel argument going on at the moment with intergovernmental organizations demanding the same or greater protection, too. Expect IGOs to react with further (mock?) outrage if the IOC/RC/RC get special treatment.
Recently unredacted ICANN board briefing documents reignited the IGO debate last week.