Internet Commerce Association - ICA

Last month, in response to continuing concerns and some outright confusion about whether brand owners would be compelled to pony up $185k application fees for defensive gTLD registrations, ICANN opened up a comment period for the purpose of clarifying the matter.

During the Public Forum held on Thursday, March 15th by ICANN’s Board of Directors at its just-concluded meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica, ICA Counsel Philip Corwin addressed the Board during the portion of the Forum devoted to an exchange of views on “Implementation issues around new gTLD rollout”.

Late on Tuesday, March 13th in San Jose, Costa Rica ICANN’s Board and its Governmental Advisory Council (GAC) met in open session to discuss a wide range of issues.

The ever-sunny skies over San Jose, Costa Rica were darkened by a dark cloud from Washington on the morning of March 10^th, the opening day of activities at ICANN’s 43^rd Public Meeting. The pall was cast by a notice posted by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) stating that it had canceled the Request for Proposal (RFP) to administer the contract to operate the authoritative DNS root server per the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

Our friend and noted domain industry journalist Andrew Allemann has just released the 2012 Domain Name Wire survey of domain investor concerns (http://domainnamewire.com/2012/02/28/government-regulation-domains/).That statistical portrait, based upon 1,143 respondents, lists Government regulation as the top (21%) concern for the domain investm

On February 23^rd the ICA sent a letter to ICANN requesting that it initiate an immediate investigation of the UDRP arbitration practices of the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based National Arbitration Forum (NAF). NAF is the number two provider of UDRP arbitration services, led only by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – in 2010, WIPO handled 2,696 UDRP filings while NAF’s total was 2,177.

A video of the ICA presentation on “Public Policies Impacting Domain Investors” delivered on February 1, 2012 at the DOMAINfest 2012 conference held in Santa Monica, California is now available online at http://domainfest.com/mediaarchive/V9 .

ICA has strongly opposed the current versions of the PIPA and SOPA anti-piracy bills because of the grave threat they pose to all domain name industry intermediary companies of being alleged to be trafficking in domains constituting “counterfeit marks” under the bill’s overbroad and vague definitions, and to being deprived of essential payment and advertising services as a result.