Re: [ga] The North American UDRP

["Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law" <froomkin@law.miami.edu>]

Task Forces are bad.  They are an excuse not to have working groups.  The
solution to this very real issue is to ban TF's and demand WG's.

On Sat, 1 Sep 2001 DannyYounger@cs.com wrote:

> As an organization, we talk a lot about the importance of geographic 
> diversity... but do we practice it?  There is a debate under way in the Names 
> Council regarding the geographical composition of the UDRP Task Force.  In 
> her message to the Council, Elisabeth Porteneuve has noted:
> 
> the simple arithmetics is:
>    16 - NA, 14 NA plus two Chairs
>     3 - EU
>     1 - LAC
>     1 - AF
>     1 - AP
> 
> In a later message she states:  "I maintain my objection to the composition 
> of UDRP TF - this group
> is not international."   Subsequently, Elisabeth introduced the following 
> motion:  
> 
> "the geographic diversity of TF must be granted, no one geographic region may 
> be represented by more than one third of members in any TF"
> 
> As could be predicted, Philip Sheppard does not concur and states:  "Please 
> consider the TF as valid and start its work directly."  Fortunately, other NC 
> members are siding with Elisabeth, and hopefully the debate will continue for 
> a while longer yet.  
> 
> This is but one of the many problems that occurs when the NC chooses to use a 
> small closed Task Force rather than a large open Working Group.  
> 
> It has been noted in the recent "Report of the Internationalized Domain Names 
> Internal Working Group of the ICANN Board of Directors" that "the deployment 
> of IDNs will increase the opportunity for cybersquatting. Survey participants 
> recommended a variety of measures, particularly increased use of UDRP 
> arbitrators familiar with non-Latin scripts, to combat this problem."  A UDRP 
> Task Force that does not contain a sufficient number of members familiar with 
> codes of Law other than North American/European or language sets other than 
> Latin-character-based is destined to perform poorly.
> 
> We are in a global environment.  I encourage the NC to add additional members 
> to its Task Force to better represent the rest of the world Internet 
> community.
> 
> As consensus in this Task Force is decided by a simple majority vote, the 
> current member composition guarantees that the North American point of view 
> will necessarily prevail.   This is not consensus; it is capture.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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