ICA Counsel Philip Corwin attended the final ICANN meeting of 2009 held in Seoul, South Korea from October 24-30 to represent and speak for the interests of ICA members.
On Thursday, October 29th the ICANN Board conducted its regular Public Forum, at which meeting participants can address their questions and concerns directly to Board members. Mr. Corwin used this opportunity twice.
On the first occasion, with the discussion focused on rights protections at new gTLDs, he proposed that any final version of Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) be subject to annual review based on comprehensive data collection to judge how it was operating and whether additional fine-tuning was needed. He also proposed that URS providers should be subject to a formal contractual relationship with ICANN to best evaluate their performance and provide ICANN with flexible enforcement tools.
On his second trip to the microphone, during a discussion of whether separation requirements between registries and registrars should be relaxed for new gTLDs, he advocated that the final Draft Applicant Guidebook (DAG) for new gTLDs contain strict prohibitions against differential renewal fee pricing by registries in order to prevent them from taxing the success achieved by registrants through website monetization and development.
The full transcript of his remarks appear below.
In addition, Mr. Corwin was interviewed on October 28th by Dynamic Network Services in regard to his activities in Seoul and the major issues he was focused on there. A streaming video of the interview can be accessed at http://www.circleid.com/posts/20091023_special_updates_from_the_icann_meetings_in_seoul/ .
http://sel.icann.org/public-forum
>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thanks. Mr. Corwin.
>>PHILIP CORWIN: Just wait for my — good morning. Philip Corwin representing the Internet Commerce Association, our members are domain investors and developers.
I want to begin by thanking the board for hearing our voice and the voice of others in Sydney that the URS and other aspects of proposed trademark protections were policy decisions and for sending that back to the GNSO. And we are now engaged constructively in that process, hoping to reach a constructive solution that gives rights-holders a fast and effective way to target egregious conduct while preserving the due process rights of registrants.
I’d like to — and that’s very necessary to preserve investor confidence, which is going to be critical to making many of these new TLDs successful.
I’d like to suggest two things. The first, I think, will facilitate a successful conclusion on the URS, which is to put in place a process very much in line with Chairman Thrush’s fondness for measurable data on which to make decisions, to give an annual review of the URS, let’s see how many complaints are filed, the average number of domains per complaint, the effect on UDRP filings, how many
protests are filed by complainants or registrars that things aren’t working right so that we know that whatever is agreed upon now can be adjusted down the road based on how things actually work out.
I think knowing there’s some flexibility in the joints will help a
lot in reaching a conclusion here.
But we need real data if we’re going to have that adjustment process
down the road.
The second thing, we think it’s a mistake not to have a contractual
relationship with the URS provider.
Accreditation is about capacity, but contracts are about performance, about having clear standards for judging performance, and for having measures of enforcement short of the death sentence of deaccreditation to discipline the provider if they’re not adhering to what they’re supposed to do.
We found with the RAA that ICANN needed intermediate steps. We think the same thing should be available against URS providers.
Thank you very much.
>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you. Very thoughtful comments.
>>PHILIP CORWIN: Yes, Philip Corwin, again, Internet Commerce
Association.
We did comment on the separation issue early on, and our position was we supported easing it only for internal TLDs, not TLDs that would be marketing names to the general public.
I think we have had an excellent debate here. We are continuing to monitor the issue. We have an open mind. We haven’t decided to change our position yet. But a very important related issue, related to market power of the registry is differential pricing. And we believe it should be prohibited.
I’m not talking about at the inception. When the TLD opens we understand there will be certain premium names for which a higher price may be set or there is an auction process or whatever. We are talking about down the road for renewals.
And let me give you a simple example. A registry opens, their initial price for domain is $8, and two registrants, register each for five-year terms. At the end of the five years, one has not been very successful in their venture, the other has built a multi-million dollar business. We don’t think the registry should be able to come back and say, well, registry one, your price for renewal is $10 a year. Registry two, you have built a very successful business, your price for renewal is $10,000 a year. Because we believe registries should be adequately compensated and make a profit as providers of technical services. But that type of differential pricing allows them being private sector taxing authorities, collecting rents on the success of others. And we do not believe that should be permitted and hope the final guidebook will not permit that.
Thank you.
>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you. Just to come back — a quick question about the internal/external point.
The worry we have about that is anything like that that requires constant policing by ICANN after the event. So how — do you really want to set up a situation where the use of the TLD is controlled only to be used by inside the corporation? And so then we have to have trademark or, sorry, domain name police who go around and check someone hasn’t left the corporation and is still using that domain name. Is that really what you are suggesting?
>>PHIL CORWIN: You know, that’s an issue we haven’t thought about, so I think we would like to think about and get back to you in detail on that.
But that appears to me something in line with kind of a post-delegation inforcement mechanism where things have changed after the initial commitments.
But we will consider that and try to get back to you in writing on that.
(Note: Minor changes to the raw transcript were made for grammatical and corrective purposes.)