You have until Monday, August 10, 2026 (23:59 UTC) to tell ICANN what you think. Do not miss this deadline. Submit comments here. There will likely be no further opportunity to comment on these changes.
Long-time readers of this blog know that I’ve spent more than a decade fighting ICANN’s repeated attempts to carve out special privileges for intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) at the expense of the fundamental rights of domain name registrants. I was a member of the original working group (2014–2018) that reached consensus against replacing the courts with arbitration. I was then shut out of the captured “EPDP” that reversed that outcome, and shut out again from the closed-door Implementation Review Team (IRT) that has now produced the draft rules ICANN published for public comment on June 30, 2026.
I’ve been digging through the draft implementation documents line by line, comparing them against the policy recommendations the ICANN Board actually adopted on April 30, 2023. I’ll have much more to say about what I found (there’s a lot), but one defect is so serious — and so indefensible — that it deserves its own RED ALERT post.
The short version
Under the UDRP as it has existed for over 26 years, if you lose a UDRP decision, you have ten business days to file a lawsuit, and if you do, your domain name stays put while the court decides the case. That stay is the single most important due process protection in the entire UDRP system. It’s what makes the “right to go to court” real instead of theoretical.
The policy recommendations that the ICANN Board adopted for IGO disputes — recommendations I opposed, but which are at least the official, adopted policy — explicitly preserved that stay. EPDP Recommendation 3(iii) says, in plain language, that the registrar “shall stay implementation” if the registrant either initiates court proceedings or requests arbitration within the ten-day window.
The draft rules ICANN just published for public comment eliminate the court option from the stay. Under draft UDRP paragraph 4(k)(ii), the only thing that stops the transfer of your domain name is a request for ICANN’s new arbitration process — a process whose rules, fees, and administrators haven’t even been published yet. If you instead exercise your right to go to a real court, with real judges, real evidence rules, and real appeals? Your domain name gets handed over to the IGO on day eleven, while your lawsuit is still pending.
Think about what that means. The draft’s own mandatory notice tells every respondent they have the “right to seek to challenge the UDRP decision… by filing a claim in court.” A registrant who believes that notice, and acts on it, loses the very property they went to court to protect. The “right” becomes a trap for the unwary — and a punishment for anyone who prefers a national court to ICANN’s untested, unspecified arbitration scheme.
And here’s the kicker: the ICANN Board’s own published rationale for adopting these recommendations described them as adding “a voluntary arbitration component to both the UDRP and URS Rules, without affecting the respondent-registrant’s ability to file judicial proceedings against an IGO at any time during a UDRP or URS proceeding.” The same rationale recorded the community’s warning that registrant rights would be harmed “if the recommendations were implemented in a way as to restrict a registrant’s ability to file judicial proceedings against an IGO or to effectively compel a registrant to agree to arbitration.”
That is exactly what this draft does. It restricts the judicial option to the point of worthlessness, and thereby compels arbitration. The implementation does precisely what the Board was warned about, and what the adopted policy text forbids.
Was this an accident? You can decide for yourself. Every drafting “error” I’ve found in this package points in the same direction, harming registrants and helping IGOs. Random mistakes don’t line up like that. It’s clear to me that the IGOs are attempting to sneak through changes while few are paying attention, and that one of the root causes is that registrant interests were not properly represented within the working group.
A Draft of What I’m submitting to ICANN
Below is the relevant section of my company’s draft comment submission (Point 1.1 of many), verbatim, so you can see the full chapter-and-verse analysis — the adopted policy text, the draft text, the misalignment, the proposed fix, and the rationale. Feel free to review it, borrow from it, or endorse it in your own comments.
Point 1.1 — The registrar stay for court proceedings required by EPDP Recommendation 3(iii) has been eliminated, and must be restored
(a) Adopted policy text. EPDP Recommendation 3(iii) (Full Consensus; Board-adopted):
“In accordance with Paragraph 4(k) of the UDRP, the relevant registrar shall wait ten (10) business days (as observed in the location of its principal office) before implementing a UDRP panel decision rendered in the IGO Complainant’s favor. The registrar shall stay implementation if, within that period, it receives official documentation that the registrant has either initiated court proceedings in its location or in the location of the registrar’s principal office or has submitted a request for or notice of arbitration.” (emphasis added)
EPDP Recommendation 3(iv) requires the stay to continue “until it receives official documentation concerning the outcome of an arbitration or other satisfactory evidence of a settlement or other final resolution of the dispute.” EPDP Recommendation 3(v) then expressly contemplates the litigation pathway proceeding to completion: “Where the registrant initiates court proceedings and the court declines to hear the merits of the case on the basis of IGO privileges and immunities, the registrant may submit the dispute to binding arbitration within ten (10) business days from the court order…”
(b) Draft text. Draft UDRP ¶4(k)(ii) provides that in proceedings brought by an IGO Complainant, the registrar “will then implement the decision unless we have received from you during that ten (10) business day period a copy of your request to initiate an Arbitral Proceeding as submitted to an Arbitral Institution, and confirmation of receipt from the Arbitral Institution…” No other ground for a stay is provided. The general court-proceedings stay in ¶4(k)(i) is unavailable in IGO cases because it applies only to lawsuits “commenced… in a jurisdiction to which the complainant has submitted under Paragraph 3(b)(xiii) of the Rules of Procedure,” and the drafts exempt IGO Complainants from that Mutual Jurisdiction submission (draft UDRP Rules ¶3(b)(xii), implementing EPDP Recommendation 2(a)).
(c) Misalignment. Recommendation 3(iii) creates two alternative stay triggers — court proceedings or arbitration. The draft implements only one. A registrant who does exactly what the adopted policy, the EPDP charter, and the draft’s own Written Notice (draft UDRP Rules ¶4(c)(i): the respondent’s “right to seek to challenge the UDRP decision… by filing a claim in court”) contemplate — filing a court claim within the ten-business-day window — obtains no stay, and the domain name is transferred while the litigation is pending. This nullifies:
- Recommendation 3(iii)’s express text;
- Recommendation 3(v), which becomes incoherent: it grants a ten-business-day arbitration window following a court order declining jurisdiction on immunity grounds, but court proceedings take months or years, by which time the domain name will long since have been transferred, re-deployed, or re-sold. The drafts contain no mechanism to unwind an implemented transfer following such a court order or subsequent arbitration;
- the GNSO Council’s binding conditions in Resolution 20190418-3 (18 April 2019), carried into the EPDP charter and quoted in the EPDP Final Report’s own explanatory text to Recommendation 2, that any solution “does not affect the right and ability of registrants to file judicial proceedings in a court of competent jurisdiction” and “preserves registrants’ rights to judicial review.” A “right” to litigate while one’s property is transferred to the adverse party is not a preserved right; and
- EPDP Annex A, General Principle 1, under which the arbitral mechanism is meant to substitute for judicial review only “as much as is feasible” — not to punish registrants who choose the judicial route that the recommendations preserve.
(d) Proposed text. Amend draft UDRP ¶4(k)(ii) to read (new text in brackets and bold blue):
“…We will then implement the decision unless we have received from you during that ten (10) business day period [either (A) official documentation (such as a copy of a complaint, file-stamped by the clerk of the court) that you have commenced a lawsuit against the IGO Complainant in the jurisdiction of your address as shown in our Registration Data or in the location of our principal office, or (B)] a copy of your request to initiate an Arbitral Proceeding as submitted to an Arbitral Institution[.] … If we receive such documentation within the ten (10) business day period, we will not implement the Administrative Panel’s decision, and we will take no further action until we receive (i) evidence satisfactory to us of a resolution between the parties; (ii) evidence satisfactory to us that your lawsuit or Arbitral Proceeding has been dismissed or withdrawn, [provided that, where a court has declined to hear the merits of the case, we will take no action until the expiry of the further ten (10) business day period provided in Paragraph 20(a)(ii)(2) of the Rules of Procedure and, if you initiate an Arbitral Proceeding within that period, until we receive a copy of an order from an Arbitral Panel]; or (iii) a copy of an order from such court or Arbitral Panel [dismissing your case or] ordering that you do not have the right to continue to use your domain name.”
Conforming changes should be made to draft UDRP Rules ¶20 (including ¶20(e)(iv)) and, for renewals during the pendency of litigation, to footnote 2 of the draft UDRP Rules (extending the “extenuating circumstance” renewal right to registrants engaged in court proceedings, not only Arbitral Proceedings).
(e) Rationale. This is the single most consequential defect in the package. The ICANN Board’s own rationale for adopting these recommendations (Minutes, Regular Meeting of the ICANN Board, 30 April 2023, section 2.c) described what the Board understood itself to be adopting: “a voluntary arbitration component to both the UDRP and URS Rules, without affecting the respondent-registrant’s ability to file judicial proceedings against an IGO at any time during a UDRP or URS proceeding” (emphasis added). A draft under which the exercise of that judicial option results in the loss of the domain name ten business days later plainly “affects” — indeed, guts — that ability, and is therefore misaligned not only with Recommendation 3(iii)’s text but with the Board’s stated basis for adoption. Without the court-proceedings stay, the entire architecture that the EPDP presented to the community — “the registrant keeps the right to go to court; arbitration is a backstop if immunity defeats the court case” — is inverted: court access becomes a guaranteed way to lose the domain name, and the “backstop” becomes the only exit. No reading of the adopted recommendations supports that inversion; Recommendation 3(iii) forecloses it in terms. We also note the draft’s additional requirement of “confirmation of receipt from the Arbitral Institution” within the window exceeds Recommendation 3(iii), which requires only documentation that the registrant “has submitted a request for or notice of arbitration”; a registrant’s timely submission cannot be defeated by a third party’s processing delays.
NB: The above is just a first draft, and I still need to make it bulletproof, to ensure that there are no “gotchas” still in the proposed “fixes” to ICANN’s draft language, but I provide the above a starting point for others. The text will evolve in future drafts, but I probably won’t update the blog until the final version is ready which will be too late for others to digest, if the comment period deadline is left unchanges. As noted below, I’d encourage others to convince ICANN to extend the deadline until the end of summer, where more eyeballs can be on these documents.
What you can do (before Monday!)
The public comment period closes on August 10, 2026 at 23:59 UTC. That’s not much time, and that’s not an accident either — the comment period was run through the peak summer vacation season.
- Submit a comment. Go to the proceeding page and use the “Provide Your Input” button (you’ll need a free ICANN account). Even a short comment demanding that the court-proceedings stay of EPDP Recommendation 3(iii) be restored to draft UDRP ¶4(k)(ii) is valuable. Feel free to state that you endorse the Leap of Faith Financial Services Inc. comments.
- Spread the word. If you own domain names, or care about due process online, share this post. Most registrants have no idea this is happening — which is exactly how the insiders prefer it.
- Ask the hard question. ICANN claims this is just “implementation” of adopted policy. Fine: then let them explain, on the record, why the implementation deletes the court-proceedings stay that the adopted policy text expressly requires, in bold black and white.
- Ask for more time to submit comments. If ICANN was acting in good faith, they would extend the deadline until after summer has concluded, say mid-September, so that the community can properly digest their deeply flawed documents that are out for public comment. Don’t hold your breath, though, on them acting in good faith. If you decide to submit a comment, you might want to ask them to extend the deadline appropriately.
The right to defend your property before a real court, with the status quo preserved while the court decides, is not a technicality. It is the line between a dispute resolution system and a confiscation system. ICANN’s own adopted policy drew that line. The draft implementation erases it. We have three days to put it back.
George Kirikos is President of Leap of Faith Financial Services Inc. He has participated in ICANN policy development on domain name rights protection mechanisms since the 2000s, and was a member of the IGO-INGO Access to Curative Rights Protection Mechanisms PDP Working Group (2014–2018).