RE: [registrars] Fw: [council] GAC and country name reservations
Erica,
The GAC is a
standing committee of ICANN whose responsibility is to interpret whether ICANN's
actions are consonant with and do not violate national laws. It has
no clear remit to proactively set ICANN rules, and in this case its
pronouncements should be ignored if not protested.
The GAC
recommendation is flawed and dangerous on several fronts. In New York, at
the behest of the International Olympic Committee, we saw several Greek
restaurants forced to change their names because of their use of the word
"Olympic", even though their use of the name predated the special status given
to the IOC and its trademarks by Federal law. We could easily see a repeat
of this kind of absurdity.
Here's what
the GAC communique says:
"...the GAC recommends that the names of countries and distinct economies, particularly those contained in the ISO 3166-1 standard, as applied by ICANN in identifying ccTLDs, should be reserved by the .info Registry, (or if registered in the Sunrise Period challenged by the Registry and, if successful, then reserved) in Latin characters in their official language(s) and in English and assigned to the corresponding governments and public authorities, at their request, for use. These names in other IDN character sets should be reserved in the same way as soon as they become available. The GAC also draws the attention of ICANN and the Registries to the fact that a large number of other names, including administrative sub-divisions of countries and distinct economies as recognised in international fora , may give rise to contested registrations. Accordingly the GAC recommends that Registrars and eventual Registrants should be made aware of this." Perhaps it's
just sloppy drafting by the GAC, but on my reading this is not just about
country names, but also about any "administrative sub-divisions", which would
include states, provinces, municipalities, police units, political parties, art
museums, etc., etc. In some countries (e.g. France) there is practically
nothing outside flea markets which are not administrative units of the central
government.
What about
"China Online" or "Bell Canada" or other names which incorporate country
names? How about "France Telecom", and ICANN-accredited registrar?
The GAC does not address this issue, but this is exactly how the Olympic Diner
in New York lost its name.
As we all
know, exclusion lists in a registry are very difficult to design and manage
effectively because a variation ("Surinam" and "Suriname"), a translation
("Germany" and "Deutschland"), or an abbreviation ("United States
of America" and "USA") can have equivalent meaning to humans but are meaningless
to machines.
ICANN has a
well-defined mechanism for dealing with "contested registrations", designed in
fact by WIPO, which is a member of GAC (why it's a member of GAC is an entirely
different question). As everyone here knows, registrars were advised by
ICANN to remain blind to registered names and to *not* exercise any oversight
with regard to domain name choices. I therefore don't understand
registrars would need to be aware or implement any restrictions, especially one
as open-ended and ill-defined as the GAC's.
I should
also note that one of the ICANN Board members, Nii Quaynor, who will be helping
to host the upcoming ICANN meeting in Accra, uses an email address at
"ghana.com". Will he be stripped of that?
Registrars
should be aware of the GAC's activist agenda and its strong preference for
governmental control of the Internet. These views are on full display in
the "GAC Principles" where ICANN is reduced to a technical co-ordinating body
which works at the behest of governmental authorities, and which were invoked,
very short-sightedly, by ICANN itself when it redelegated the .AU domain last
month. The independence of ccTLDs has been severly undermined by the
GAC, and I would urge registrars to speak out against governmental incursion
into the gTLD namespaces, especially when the attempt is as ham-fisted as
this one.
Antony Van
Couvering
NameEngine
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