On the afternoon of Thursday, December 9th ICA Counsel Philip Corwin presented the following oral statement to the ICANN Board on the topic of the proposed Final Applicant Guidebook for new gTLDs—
PHILIP CORWIN: Good afternoon. Philip Corwin, counsel for the Internet Commerce Association, representing domain name investors and developers.
And to set my remarks in context, ICA members own and manage approximately 10% of all gTLD domains and are actively — I know our members are looking actively at new TLDs as both investors and registrants, and we’ve just filed detailed comments. We’d be happy to work with ICANN staff on the refinements I’m going to mention now.
Two principal concerns–
On the three strikes rule for UDRP losses for applicants, we’re concerned the UDRP is not consistent or predictable. That needs to be addressed down the road in UDRP reform. But we think that this three strikes rule needs to take portfolio size into account. There’s a big difference between losing three — if you have 300 domains versus 300,000.
It should look at your overall record; if you’ve won the significant majority of UDRPs brought against you shouldn’t be considered a bad actor.
And if you’ve used the UDRP appeal process, gone under national law, and won a reversal of the initial decision, that should not be counted in the record.
And also, to balance things, for those who have tried to steal domains through repeated abuse of the UDRP and have been found repeatedly to be reverse domain name hijackers, there should be a similar rule.
On the URS, we’re somewhat dismayed that the board changed the response time from 20 to 14 days which was part of the STI-RT recommendations unanimously adopted by the GNSO. We would hope that there would be some better guidance – not inflexible rules but guidance — on when good-faith exceptions will be granted.
And finally, we want to — and we hope the URS providers are put under contract, which is another STI-RT recommendation.
Finally, want to commend CEO Beckstrom for his remarks in the GAC meeting the other day about the ease of recognizing fears versus the inability to recognize future benefits.
Had the public Internet been put on hold until all the industries to be disrupted by it had all their concerns alleviated, we would still be waiting for it and would not have realized all its benefits.
Thank you very much.
[Remarks edited to correct errors in raw transcript; full transcript of the Public Forum can be found at http://cartagena39.icann.org/node/15493.]