No Such Weblog

Philip Sheppard has posted a draft final report to the GNSO Council gTLDs committee (HTML version here). Writes the ALAC’s Wendy Seltzer: I’m concerned that the detailed recommendations perpetuate the “beauty contest” mode of selecting new gTLDs rather than making name addition a routine process.

Comments can be submitted to ALAC’s forum address.

The Nominating Committee FAQ touches on travel funding for NomComm-appointed GNSO Council members only briefly, by quoting the bylaws’ non-obligation to provide funding as a response. It appears that ICANN would prefer GNSO Council members to fund their own travel. That’s unfortunate: For being effective on the council, it’s crucial to be physically present at ICANN meetings. ICANN’s apparent expectation that GNSO Council members fund their own travel will lead to a dilemma for the Nominating Committee: Either, they send people to the Council who can’t (or don’t want to) commit meeting expenses, and won’t be effective. Or they send people who can easily cough up the necessary expenses (entry level at $6,000 – $9,000 a year, flying economy), but probably have a commercial interest in the GNSO Council’s decisions. Both alternatives would be contrary to the very reason why there will be nominating committee appointees on the council. Either way, the reformed ICANN won’t work unless ICANN comes up with appropriate funding for the bodies it creates and the volunteers it appoints.

Disclaimer: I haven’t submitted any statement of interest, and I won’t do so during the 12 minutes remaining until the deadline expires.

The At-Large Advisory Committee’s position on new gTLDs has just been submitted to the GNSO’s new gTLD “committee of the whole”.

Peter Dengate Thrush has forwarded some recent discussions about the ERC’s Fifth Supplemental Implementation Report to the GA. Worth reading.

The At-Large Advisory Committee has posted draft comments on the WIPO2 recommendations. In the draft, we raise concerns about the idea of implementing these recommendations through the ICANN process, for two main reasons: 1. What WIPO recommends seems to amount to the creation of new rules which are not backed by existing law — even the WIPO2 report makes that observation. That is, in order to follow WIPO’s recommendations, ICANN would have to overstep its mission and get into the law-making business. 2. The WIPO recommendations seem to call for a dispute resolution process which would (unlike the UDRP) not be subject to review in regular court. Once more, this sounds like a kind of law-making for which the ICANN process is not suitable.

As a conclusion from these concerns, we support the GNSO Council’s advice to separate discussion about the WIPO recommendations from UDRP review. We also urge the board to ensure that any policy-development process addressing the WIPO recommendations stays within the confines of ICANN’s mission, and is limited to implementing existing legal consensus (as opposed to creating “new law”).

In an Annex, we provide some preliminary observations on some of the individual recommendations’ merits.

The draft is up for public comments. Comments can be submitted to the usual forum address, and will be archived publicly. An RSS feed of the comments we receive is separately available.

Some RSS feeds pointing into list archives, updated every three hours: ALAC, GNSO Council. More feeds (including for the ALAC’s public comment addresses) are available from here.

Two valuable links from trademark.blog. WIPO has published a comic on copyright. “Buying the CD means listening to it is your only right”; copying without permission is compared to stealing a car. Matt (the guy who originally blogged this one) describes his state of mind after reading the comic as shell-shocked. BTW, this is the same organization which is currently asking ICANN to extend the UDRP to create new rights in IGO names and acronyms, and country names. (“And, by the way, please also scrap that pesky review of UDRP decisions in ordinary courts, while you’re at it.”) More on that soon.

On the “useful references” front, OECD has published a report which compares DNS administration (including trademark and WHOIS policies) throughout its member states.

Comments submitted to ALAC are now being properly archived.

… is not such a new idea, as this mailing list posting from 1999 demonstrates. A slightly modified version of the example configuration file in that message is what I use for the possible prototype of an ALAC comments site discovered and announced by Bret.

Louis Touton to the GNSO Council: At its meeting today, the ICANN Board unanimously adopted the GNSO Council’s 20 February 2003 recommendations on inter-registrar transfers of domain-name registrations. The recommendations will now enter an implementation phase.

Other topics: The board ratified a year’s worth of board meeting minutes, and funding for the nominating committee. That funding includes expenses associated with a face-to-face meeting of the Nominating Committee. Preliminary minutes of the meeting.