IFFOR targets new gTLDs with policy service

The International Foundation For Online Responsibility, which sets policy for .xxx, wants to broaden its scope and is to launch a “Policy Engine” service for new gTLD registries.
Kieren McCarthy, who has been working for IFFOR as its public participation manager for the last year, has been tapped to lead the organization too, taking over from Joan Irvine as executive director in April.
IFFOR is the sponsoring organization for .xxx, independent but created by registry manager ICM Registry as a way to demonstrate to ICANN that it planned to operate the porn gTLD responsibly.
It’s kept a bit of a low profile since .xxx launched, only emerging to distribute some small grants to worthy causes, but McCarthy says that it’s built up substantial policy-making and compliance expertise.
Now, it wants to let new gTLD registries outsource these functions to it.
“Broadly, the Policy Engine service lets gTLD applicants outsource their policy issues to an independent body,” McCarthy said.
IFFOR reckons plenty of new gTLDs will want such services, especially given the increased interest from governments in how new gTLDs are operated.
As the organization is currently set up to deal only with .xxx — it’s funded $10 a year from every .xxx sold — only three of its nine-member Policy Council are not members of the adult entertainment industry or connected to ICM.
Additionally, ICM’s general counsel is on its three-member board of directors.
But McCarthy said that the Policy Council, which also has substantial expertise in privacy, child protection and free speech issues, usually uses sub-groups to come up with its policies.
“The majority of what we do is applicable across any top-level domain,” he said.
McCarthy is the former journalist and ICANN staffer, current CEO of .nxt. When he takes over from Irvine in April, she is expected to stay around as a consultant.

ICANN has found a sub-$500 URS provider

ICANN has picked a provider for its Uniform Rapid Suspension anti-cybersquatting service, one that’s willing to manage cases at under $500 per filing.
The news came from new gTLD program manager Christine Willett during webcast meetings this week.
“We have identified a provider for the URS who’s going to be able to provide that service within the target $300 to $500 filing fee price range. We’re in the process of formalizing that relationship,” she said last night.
The name of the lucky provider has not yet been revealed — Willett expects that news to come in February — but it’s known that several vendors were interested in the gig.
URS is a complement to the existing UDRP system, designed to enable trademark owners to execute quick(ish) takedowns, rather than transfers, of infringing domain names.
ICANN found itself in a bit of a quandary last year when UDRP providers WIPO and the National Arbitration Forum said they doubted it could be done for the target fee without compromising registrant rights.
But a subsequent RFP — demanded by members of the community — revealed several providers willing to hit the sub-$500 target.
ICANN expects to approve multiple URS vendors over time.

Chehade: “Honestly, if it was up to me, I would delay the whole release of new gTLDs by at least a year…”

“…but I’m not going to.”
CEO Fadi Chehade this afternoon delivered a blisteringly frank assessment of ICANN’s new gTLD program, admitting that if it were up to him he would delay the whole thing by a year.
Speaking bluntly, mainly to registries and registrars, at a regional ICANN meeting in Amsterdam this afternoon, Chehade painted a stark picture of the challenge ICANN faces in meeting its deadlines.
It’s worth quoting at length:

Honestly, if it was up to me, I would delay the whole release of new gTLDs by at least a year.
I’m being very candid with you. I know none of you want to hear this, and I’m not going to do this — let me repeat, I’m not going to do this — but you should know that a lot of the foundations that I would be comfortable with, as someone who has built businesses before, are just not yet there.
I’m being super-candid with you because many of you wrote me in the last three weeks to say: ‘Be up-front with us, we’re business-people, tell us the truth.’ Well, the truth is that the people, processes and tools to enable a sector such as this are being built as the car is already running very fast.
We’re putting enormous pressure on our team to not to slip by a day. I’m now managing them with Akram [Atallah, COO] down to days. Before I came it was by quarters, by months, and I say no — every day we slip we’re delaying this industry from serving the market it’s supposed to serve.
It’s just a different mindset. And it’s a difference set of, frankly, talents that we’re bringing to the table. We have people who took six years to write the [new gTLD Applicant] Guidebook and we’re asking engineers and software people and third-party vendors and hundreds of people to get that whole program running in six months.
When the number two at IBM called me, Erich Clementi, after we signed the deal with them to do the [Trademark Clearinghouse] he said “Are you nuts?”. Literally, quote. He said: “Fadi you’ve built these systems for us before. You know it takes three times the amount of time it takes to write the specs to build reliable systems.”
But that’s the position we’re in, guys. I’m being candid with you. I know all of I know all of you want me to have this thing up and running yesterday. I want it running the day before yesterday. But this is what we’re facing. We’re facing a difficult situation, we’re working hard as we can, our people are at the edge. We have people who are working seven days a week now — it’s never happened before — on the new gTLD program.
We’re hiring as fast as we can. We’re now taking away from Christine [Willett, new gTLD program manager] some of the work she had to do so she can communicate better with you.
We’re doing a whole bunch of things so we can deliver this for you.
I don’t mean to scare you, because I know many of your businesses rely on this, but the right people are now in place, we’re building it as fast as we can but I want you to understand that this is tough, and I wish it were different. I wish you would all raise your hands and say: “You know what? Let’s take a break and meet in a year”.
I know you can’t do that, I know I can’t do that, and I know that the market can’t wait for that.
We’re going to do our best, and if in the process if we miss telling you something, if we move too fast on something before we share it with everybody as we normally should… give us a little bit of a break.
I don’t want to delay this program, but under all circumstances my mind would tell me: stop.

Chehade’s remarks come two weeks after new gTLD applicants gave new program manager Willett a good kicking during a webinar updating them on the program’s progress, during which it was revealed that a key deadline had been missed for at least the fourth or fifth time.
What else can we learn from his comments?
Well… here’s my interpretation:

• Put down the mic and back off, Kinderis. Yeah, that means you too, Fausett, and you, Neuman.
• It will be an absolute miracle if the Trademark Clearinghouse doesn’t suffer from teething troubles.
• Applicants are almost certainly going to see more delays of some form or another (always a safe prediction), and probably from the place they least expect it.
• The program wasn’t ready when it was approved in May 2011 (as many people, including yours truly, said at the time and have continued to say since).
• It’s probably not much fun working at ICANN right now, but at least the new boss knows what the hell he’s doing.

Industry man Chehade admits strawman “mistake”

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade today admitted that he badly handled recent discussions about improving trademark protections in the new gTLD program, saying he made a “mistake”.
The remarks came during his speech at a meeting of registries and registrars in Amsterdam this afternoon.
The address, which along with a Q&A lasted an hour, was remarkable for Chehade’s passion and candor, and his apparently conscious decision to portray himself as an industry man.
But he arguably risked alienating the parts of the ICANN community that would certainly not define themselves as part of the “industry”, such as the intellectual property community.
This was no more evident as when he discussed the controversial trademark protection “strawman” proposals.
“We’re moving very fast at ICANN now,” he said. “You almost have no idea how fast we’re moving. We are opening so many new things and fixing so many things, that frankly should have been done for a long time at ICANN, that the speed at which we’re moving is making me, and sometimes my team, make mistakes.”
“I made one big mistake in the last few months,” he said. “I didn’t quite fully understand… this concept of ‘trying to take a second bite at the apple’, when I engaged with the Trademark Clearinghouse discussions.”
That’s a reference to meetings in Brussels and Los Angeles late last year, convened by Chehade at the request of the Intellectual Property Constituency and Business Constituency.
These meetings came up with the strawman proposals, which would create (arguably) new rights protection mechanisms and bolster others in favor of trademark owners.
Registries, registrars and new gTLD applicants complained that the IPC/BC proposals had already been considered multiple times by ICANN and the community and discarded.
Apparently Chehade has now come around to their way of thinking, helped in part by Non-Commercial User Constituency member Maria Farrell’s complaint about the strawman process.
“I frankly didn’t fully understand until I went through the process, and appreciated what people were actually trying to do,” Chehade said. “So, okay, big learning experience for me… I take it, I move on and hopefully I won’t make that mistake again.”
What does this mean for the strawman? Well, it’s not looking great.
While the proposals are still open for public comment, at some point ICANN is going to have to decide which bits it wants to adopt as “implementation” and which are more suited to policy development.
After today’s comments, I’d expect Chehade to be less inclined to push for the former.

It’s official: people hate the domain name industry

I’ve said it many times before: the domain name industry has problems with its reputation. But now the official figures are in that — apparently — prove it.
According to ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade, the industry is perceived four times worse the IT industry average.
That figure — whatever it means — came out of a “reputational analysis” study conducted by expensive consultants hired by ICANN, Chehade told registrars and registries in Amsterdam today.
“The results were not flattering,” he said. “The negative perception of our industry runs four times the IT industry average.”
“Our industry is not a well-established or well-received industry,” Chehade said.
A second study conducted by a pricey PR firm — which looked at media coverage and polled the big three tech industry analysis firms — apparently confirmed the results.
“None of the three top analysts cover our sector,” he said. “They don’t even look at it.”
“Let’s stop the constant attacking of our registrars and registries,” he later added.
“Are there bad actors? Every industry has bad actors, but ours are somehow featured all the time in the media,” he said. “How about if we talk about the good guys that do real works and serve their communities and help businesses thrive? That’s the story I want to tell.”
Chehade said he’d shared the results of the two studies with the CEOs of major registrars at a roundtable discussion at ICANN HQ last week.
He said he’s trying to reach out to analysts to engage more with ICANN in a bid to improve the industry’s reputation.
“As the new gTLD program rolls in the second half of this year, it’s very important that we’re prepared with the right people in these places so our perception, and how the industry talks about us, is the right thing,” he said.
Chehade, who’s been at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, also pointed to a pronounced lack of awareness of the domain name sector among other industry leaders.
“Out of the CEOs I met — and I met many — I’d say half of them don’t know who we are,” Chehade said.
He said that one profile-raising idea that came out of his registrar CEO round-table was to create “the first DNS world conference… a true business and industry conference”.
There’s also talk about a “good housekeeping” seal for well-behaved domain name industry companies.
“If it’s perception issue or an actual issue, we need to do things that start showing the world we are a responsible industry,” he said.
Chehade plans to meet next month with registry CEOs and invited new gTLD applicant back-ends, and later with the leaders of ccTLD registries.

Google backing new gTLD trade association

New gTLD applicants and others have been meeting in Amsterdam this morning to discuss setting up a new trade association to promote new gTLDs and domain names in general.
The meeting, which was organized by Google, coincided with but was separate from an ICANN registry-registrar gathering in the city.
According to sources on the ground, the proposed trade association would be focused on raising consumer awareness about domain names and their benefits, outside of the ICANN community.
It’s a very early-stage idea, and today’s meeting — we hear — discussed things like possible funding sources and membership requirements.
More details are expected to emerge later today.
We also hear that the important topic of “universal acceptance” of TLDs has been discussed.
As we reported earlier in the week, there’s still not enough support from major software developers (including browser makers, whose job it is to connect users to web sites) for some of the newest TLDs.
Lack of awareness could cause technical problems as well as marketing ones, so a trade association — especially one back by Google’s headline-raising powers — may well be good for the industry.
Google is an applicant for almost 100 new gTLDs.

Trademark Clearinghouse prices revealed

The cost of submitting trademarks to the forthcoming Trademark Clearinghouse will start at $150 per year, the Clearinghouse operator has revealed.
In a complex fee structure documents released this morning, the Clearinghouse outlines a range of discounting schemes that could reduce the cost to as little as $95 a year for big volume users.
But it looks like it’s going to be quite difficult to qualify for really substantial discounts.
Marks submitted to the Clearinghouse will eligible for the Trademark Claims service, which alerts the owners if someone registers a matching domain name, and may be eligible for new gTLD Sunrise periods.
The fees outlined today cover both services, though new gTLD registries will of course charge their own Sunrise fees on top of what the Clearinghouse asks.
The documents break down two types of pricing: basic credit card payments (for people with 10 trademarks or fewer) and advanced prepayment pricing, which is reserved for “agents”.
Agents will in most cases be digital brand management companies (think Melbourne IT or Markmonitor) but the Clearinghouse tells us that trademark owners can also become agents if they pre-pay.
The basic, credit-card tier costs $150 per year for a single trademark. The cost is reduced to $145 per year if the trademark owner registers the mark for three or five years.
The prepaid advanced tier is rather more complicated, based on the number of “status points” customers rack up.
A status point is earned for each trademark-year registered, with bonus points awarded for multi-year registrations and registrations made in a special “early bird” period (before the first-to-launch new gTLD’s Sunrise period begins).
Excluding these bonuses, agents would have to register over 100,000 trademark-years in order to qualify for $95-a-year pricing, which is the lowest available.
Multi-year registrations would make make the discounts kick in earlier, but only after certain milestones are passed.
The Clearinghouse document gives this example:

If you register the first 3,000 trademarks for a single year, they will be charged at 145 USD per registration. The next 22,000 will be charged at 135 USD. The next 35,000 registrations will be charged at 120 USD. For 60,000 registrations you will have paid 435,000 + 2,970,000 + 4,200,000 USD, or an average price of 126.75 USD

Smart agents will likely want to register their multi-year marks first, in order to earn bonus points and more quickly qualify for the cheaper rate on their single-year registrations.
Whether agents pass on their discounts to their customers is another matter entirely.
The Clearinghouse fees will be calculated based on the number of trademarks submitted, rather than the number of domain names matching those trademarks.
Each mark will automatically get up to 10 matching domain names entered into the database. If your trademark is “Joe’s Autos” your matching domain strings could be “joesautos”, “joes-autos” and even “joe-s-autos”.
Trademark owners will have to pay an extra dollar per year for each matching domain beyond 10.
The Clearinghouse — operated by Deloitte with a back-end provided by IBM — still plans to launch later in the first quarter this year.
You can download its pricing scheme from its web site.

Apple, Google and Microsoft still don’t understand new TLDs

The world’s most-popular web browsers are still failing to recognize new top-level domains, many months after they go live on the internet.
The version of the Safari browser that ships with the Mountain Lion iteration of Apple’s OS X appears to have even gone backwards, removing support for at least one TLD.
The most recent versions of Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer also both fail to recognize at least two of the internet’s most recently added TLDs.
According to informal tests on multiple computers this week, Safari 6 on Mountain Lion and the Windows 7 versions of Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome v24 all don’t understand .post and .cw addresses.
Remarkably, it appears that Safari 6 also no longer supports .sx domains, despite the fact that version 5 does.
Typing affected domain names into the address bars of these browsers will result in surfers being taken to a search page (usually Google) instead of their intended destination.
If you want to test your own browser, registry.sx, una.cw and ems.post are all valid, resolving domain names you can try.
The gTLD .post was entered into the DNS root last August and the first second-level domain names went live in October.
The ccTLDs .sx and .cw are for Sint Maarten (Dutch part) and Curacao respectively, two of three countries formed by the breakup of the Netherlands Antilles in 2010.
ICANN approved the delegation of .cw in October 2011 and second-level domains there have been live since at least July 2012 (that’s when the registry’s site, una.cw, went live).
SX Registry’s .sx was delegated in December 2011 and sites there have been live since early 2012. It went into general availability in November.
Safari v5 on Windows and OS X recognizes .sx as a TLD, but v6 on Mountain Lion does not.
The problems faced by .post and .cw on Chrome appear to be mostly due to the fact that neither TLD is included on the Public Suffix List, which Google uses to figure out what a TLD looks like.
A few days after we reported last May that .sx didn’t work on Chrome, SX Registry submitted its details to the PSL, which appears to have solved its problems with that browser.
It’s not at all clear to me why .sx is borked on newer versions of Safari but not the older ones.
If the problem sounds trivial, believe me: it’s not.
The blurring of the lines between search and direct navigation is one of the biggest threats to the long-term relevance of domain names, so it’s vital to the industry’s interests that the problem of universal acceptance is sorted out sooner rather than later.

GAC Early Warnings just got a whole lot more important

ICANN will let new gTLD applicants change their applications in order to respond to the concerns of governments, it has emerged.
Changes to applications made as a result of Early Warnings made by the Governmental Advisory Committee “would in all likelihood be permitted”, ICANN chair Steve Crocker informed the GAC this week.
ICANN is also looking at ways to make these changes enforceable in the respective applicants’ registry contracts.
Combined, the two bits of news confirm that the GAC will have greater power over new gTLD business models than previously anticipated.
The revelations came in the ICANN board of directors’ official response to GAC advice emerging from last October’s Toronto meeting.
After Toronto, the GAC had asked ICANN whether applicants would be able to change their applications in response to Early Warnings, and whether the changes made would be binding.
In response, Crocker told his GAC counterpart, Heather Dryden, that ICANN already has a procedure for approving or denying application change requests.
The process “balances” a number of criteria, including whether the changes would impact competing applicants or change the applicant’s evaluation score, but it’s not at all clear how ICANN internally decides whether to approve a request or not. So far, none have been denied.
Crocker told Dryden:

It is not possible to generalize as to whether change requests resulting from early warnings would be permitted in all instances. But if such requests are intended solely to address the “range of specific issues” listed on page 3 of the Toronto Communique, and do not otherwise conflict with the change request criteria noted above, then such request would in all likelihood be permitted.

The “range of specific issues” raised in the Toronto advice (pdf) are broad enough to cover pretty much every Early Warning:

• Consumer protection
• Strings that are linked to regulated market sectors, such as the financial, health and charity sectors
• Competition issues
• Strings that have broad or multiple uses or meanings, and where one entity is seeking exclusive use
• Religious terms where the applicant has no, or limited, support from the relevant religious organisations or the religious community
• Minimising the need for defensive registrations
• Protection of geographic names
• Intellectual property rights particularly in relation to strings aimed at the distribution of music, video and other digital material
• The relationship between new gTLD applications and all applicable legislation

Some Early Warnings, such as many filed against gTLD bids that would represent regulated industries such as finance and law, ask applicants to improve their abuse mitigation measures.
To avoid receiving potential lethal GAC Advice this April, such applicants were asked to improve their rights protection mechanisms and anti-abuse procedures.
In some cases, changes to these parts of the applications could — feasibly — impact the evaluation score.
The GAC also made it clear in Toronto that it expects that commitments made in applications — including commitments in changes made as a result of Early Warnings — should be enforceable by ICANN.
This is a bit of a big deal. It refers to Question 18 in the new gTLD application, which was introduced late at the request of the GAC and covers the “mission/purpose” of the applied-for gTLD.
Answers to Question 18 are not scored as part of the new gTLD evaluation, and many applicants took it as an invitation to waffle about how awesome they plan to be.
Now it seems possible they they could be held to that waffle.
Crocker told Dryden (with my emphasis):

The New gTLD Program does not currently provide a mechanism to adopt binding contractual terms incorporating applicant statements and commitment and plans set forth within new gTLD applications or arising from early warning discussions between applicants and governments. To address concerns raised by the GAC as well as other stakeholders, staff are developing possible mechanisms for consideration by the Board New gTLD Committee. That Committee will discuss the staff proposals during the upcoming Board Workshop, 31 Janaury – 2 February.

In other words, early next month we could see some new mechanisms for converting Question 18 blah into enforceable contractual commitments that new gTLD registries will have to abide be.

New gTLD “strawman” splits community

The ICANN community is split along the usual lines on the proposed “strawman” solution for strengthening trademark protections in the new gTLD program.
Registrars, registries, new gTLD applicants and civil rights voices remain adamant that the proposals — hashed out during closed-door meetings late last year — go too far and would impose unreasonable restrictions on new gTLDs registries and free speech in general.
The Intellectual Property Constituency and Business Constituency, on the other hand, are (with the odd exception) equally and uniformly adamant that the strawman proposals are totally necessary to help prevent cybersquatting and expensive defensive registrations.
These all-too-predictable views were restated in about 85 emails and documents filed with ICANN in response to its initial public comment period on the strawman, which closed last night.
Many of the comments were filed by some of the world’s biggest brand owners — many of them, I believe, new to the ICANN process — in response to an International Trademark Association “call to action” campaign, revealed in this comment from NCS Pearson.
The strawman proposals include:

• A compulsory 30-day heads-up window before each new gTLD starts its Sunrise period.
• An extension of the Trademark Claims service — which alerts trademark owners and registrants when a potentially infringing domain is registered — from 60 days to 90 days.
• A mandatory “Claims 2” service that trademark owners could subscribe to, for an additional fee, to receive Trademark Claims alerts for a further six to 12 months.
• The ability for trademark owners to add up to 50 confusingly similar strings to each of their Trademark Clearinghouse records, provided the string had been part of a successful UDRP complaint.
• A “Limited Preventative Registration” mechanism, not unlike the .xxx Sunrise B, which would enable trademark owners to defensively register non-resolving domains across all new gTLDs for a one-off flat fee.

Brand owners fully support all of these proposals, though some companies filing comments complained that they do not go far enough to protect them from defensive registration costs.
The Limited Preventative Registration proposal was not officially part of the strawman, but received many public comments anyway (due largely to INTA’s call-to-action).
The Association of National Advertisers comments were representative:

an effective LPR mechanism is the only current or proposed RPM [Rights Protection Mechanism] that addresses the critical problem of defensive registrations in the new Top Level Domain (gTLD) approach. LPR must be the key element of any meaningful proposal to fix RPMs.

Others were concerned that the extension to Trademark Claims and proposed Claims 2 still didn’t go far enough to protect trademark rights.
Lego, quite possibly the most aggressive enforcer of its brand in the domain name system, said that both time limits are “arbitrary” and called for Trademark Claims to “continue indefinitely”.
It’s pretty clear that even if ICANN does adopt the strawman proposals in full, it won’t be the end of the IP community’s lobbying for even stronger trademark protections.
On the other side of the debate, stakeholders from the domain name industry are generally happy to embrace the 30-day Sunrise notice period (many will be planning to do this in their pre-launch marketing anyway).
A small number also appear to be happy to extend Trademark Claims by a month. But on all the other proposals they’re clear: no new rights protection mechanisms.
There’s a concern among applicants that the strawman proposals will lead to extra costs and added complexity that could add friction to their registrar and reseller channel and inhibit sales.
The New TLD Applicant Group, the part of the Registries Constituency representing applicants for 987 new gTLDs, said in its comments:

because the proposals would have significant impact on applicants, the applicant community should be supportive before ICANN attempts to change such agreements and any negative impacts must be mitigated by ICANN.

There’s a concern, unstated by NTAG in its comments, that many registrars will be reluctant to carry new gTLDs at launch if they have to implement more temporary trademark-protection measures.
New registries arguably also stand to gain more in revenue than they lose in reputation if trademark owners feel they have to register lots of domains defensively. This is also unstated.
NTAG didn’t say much about the merits of the strawman in it comments. Along with others, its comments were largely focused on whether the changes would be “implementation” or “policy”, saying:

There can be no doubt that the strawman proposal represents changes to policy rather than implementation of decided policy.

If something’s “policy”, it needs to pass through the GNSO and its Policy Development Process, which would take forever and have an uncertain outcome. Think: legislation.
If it’s “implementation”, it can be done rather quickly via the ICANN board. Think: executive decision.
It’s becoming a bit of a “funny cause it’s true” in-joke that policy is anything you don’t want to happen and implementation is anything you do.
Every comment that addresses policy vs implementation regarding the strawman conforms fully to this truism.
NTAG seems to be happy to let ICANN mandate the 30-day Sunrise heads-up, for example, even though it would arguably fit into the definition of “policy” it uses to oppose other elements of the strawman.
NTAG, along with other commenters, has rolled out a “gotcha” mined from a letter then-brand-new ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade sent to the US Congress last September.
In the letter, Chehade said: “ICANN is not in a position to unilaterally require today an extension of the 60-day minimum length of the trademark claims service.”
I’m not sure how much weight the letter carries, however. ICANN could easily argue that its strawman negotiations mean any eventual decision to extend Claims was not “unilateral”.
As far as members of the the IPC and BC are concerned, everything in the strawman is implementation, and the LPR proposal is nothing more than an implementation detail too.
The Coalition for Online Accountability, which represents big copyright holders and has views usually in lock-step with the IPC, arguably put it best:

The existing Rights Protection Mechanisms, which the Strawman Solution and the LPR proposal would marginally modify, are in no way statements of policy. The RPMs are simply measures adopted to implement policies calling for the new gTLD process to incorporate respect for the rights (including the intellectual property rights) of others. None of the existing RPMs is the product of a PDP. They originated in an exercise entitled the Implementation Recommendation Team, formed at the direction of the ICANN Board to recommend how best to implement existing policies. It defies reason to assert that mechanisms instituted to implement policy cannot now be modified, even to the minimal extent provided in the current proposals, without invoking the entire PDP apparatus.

Several commenters also addressed the process used to create the strawman.
The strawman emerged from a closed-doors, invitation-only event in Los Angeles last November. It was so secretive that participants were even asked not to tweet about it.
You may have correctly inferred, reading previous DI coverage, that this irked me. While I recognize the utility of private discussions, I’m usually in favor of important community meetings such as these being held on the public record.
The fact that they were held in private instead has already led to arguments among even those individuals who were in attendance.
During the GNSO Council’s meeting December 20 the IPC representative attempted to characterize the strawman as a community consensus on what could constitute mere implementation changes.
He was shocked — shocked! — that registrars and registries were subsequently opposed to the proposals.
Not being privy to the talks, I don’t know whether this rhetoric was just amusingly naive or an hilariously transparent attempt to capitalize on the general ignorance about what was discussed in LA.
Either way, it didn’t pass my sniff test for a second, and contracted parties obviously rebutted the IPC’s take on the meeting.
What I do know is that this kind of pointless, time-wasting argument could have been avoided if the talks had happened on the public record.