Internet Commerce Association - ICA

On October 3^{rd, at} 1500 UTC, ICANN will hold a publicly accessible webinar on the further development of the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) rights protection mechanism (RPM) for new gTLDs.

Is it really less than a week ago that Melbourne IT (MIT) hosted a Washington, DC forum on “Trademarks and New gTLDs”?

For more than a year ICA has been asking ICANN when it will commence with the task of implementing the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) policy for the new gTLD program as it currently stands in the Applicant Guidebook (AG).

On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 5^th ICA attended a meeting on rights protection mechanisms (RPMs) for new gTLDs held at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington. About 40 persons attended in person, with another half dozen connected by phone, and almost all of them were from law firms, trade associations, corporations, and consultancies representing major brand interests.

On August 30^th three members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano raising questions about the legality and methodology of the Operations In Our Sites domain seizure program jointly launched by those Cabinet Departments in November 2010.

Melbourne IT’s involvement with ICANN dates back to 1999, when ICANN awarded it one of the first five registrar licenses to compete with the then-monopoly of Network Solutions Inc. in registering domain names under .com, .net and .org. It remains in the top tier of Internet registrars today, with 4.5 million domains under management.

ICANN has posted a “tentative roadmap” for the future direction of the new gTLD program. It is available at http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and-media/announcement-17aug12-en .

ICANN’s policy and decision making process is supposedly based upon a bottom up, community consensus model. While we are all for careful deliberation before major policies are adopted and implementing actions are taken, we cannot support endless process for its own sake – especially when no concrete action ever results.

The Chairmen and ranking minority members of the U.S.