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As I warned in October 2021, an ICANN working group intends to seriously jeopardize domain name owners’ legal rights. There was a call for public comments, and my own company submitted a substantial 54 page submission, as did others.

However, the working group just posted to their mailing list a draft of their final report yesterday (see the DOCX attachment at the bottom), one that is essentially unchanged from their highly criticized initial report’s 5 recommendations. IGOs are given new rights not present in law, and instead the rights of domain name registrants to due process are ignored.

Continue reading “Sham ICANN Working Group Plans To Trample on Domain Name Registrants’ Legal Rights”

In mid-October, I sent an open letter to the ICANN Board regarding IGO protections.  Today, they responded with the following letter (which should find its way to the ICANN Correspondence page shortly):

Maarten Botterman letter to George Kirikos Dated December 9, 2021 re: PROTECTIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS

In response, I wrote the following:

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BY EMAIL ONLY

December 9, 2021

Dear Mr. Botterman,

I have received your letter of today, responding to my prior correspondence.

I am encouraged by your statement that “it will not be appropriate to
provide greater protection to IGOs than what exists under
international law”. However it’s a fact that current policy already
provides greater protection to IGOs than what exists under
international law. Similarly, the current EPDP’s work threatens to go
much further, thereby harming domain name registrants’ rights by
providing IGOs with greater rights than exist under international law.

If your statement that “it will not be appropriate to provide greater
protection to IGOs than what exists under international law” is
correct (and it’s a statement I agree with), then ICANN should
terminate the EPDP and roll back the policies that exceed the actual
rights of IGOs under international law.

As for the “Reply Period Public Comments”, it is not correct that
their discontinuation in 2014 represented any “improvement” of the
process. Furthermore, that change continues to violate the Bylaws,
which literally require a reasonable opportunity to reply to the
comments of others. If a comment is submitted on the final day, for
example, or even in the last 30 minutes of a comment period, it is
unreasonable to require the public to respond within that same day or
within 30 minutes, as the case may be. Indeed, your own reply to my
short correspondence took nearly 2 months, which demonstrates that the
public generally needs weeks to read and consider their own responses.

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
416-588-0269
http://www.leap.com/

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After a Herculean effort, I’ve managed to complete my company’s comment submission to ICANN, to respond to the dangerous proposal from its working group which would have severe negative consequences for domain name owners. My company’s comment can be read below:

Comments of Leap of Faith Financial Services Inc. submitted to ICANN on October 23, 2021

The deadline for comments is Sunday, October 24, 2021 at 23:59 UTC, and can be made by going here.  That’s less than 24 hours from the time of this blog post.

You can read the comments of others (16 at the time of this blog post, including one by the Internet Commerce Association) here. It takes only a few minutes to sign up for an account to endorse/support the comments of others (that’s what some of the IGOs have done, to support the comments of WIPO).

Past blog posts on this topic can be read here, here, here, and here.

If the proposals are adopted without any changes, there would be great risk for consequence free reverse domain name hijacking. I urge people to take this seriously and to submit comments opposing the changes.

 

In a blog post last week, I sounded the alarm about a dangerous proposal from an ICANN working group which would have severe negative consequences for domain name owners, allowing IGOs (intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations) to engage in consequence-free reverse domain name hijacking.

To understand what led to such a report, I decided to look at the actual participation of working group members, as per the mailing list activities and on the weekly calls (transcripts are available on the GNSO Calendar page). The shocking results [visible on the web via a published Google Spreadsheet, with graphs) clearly demonstrate why such one-sided proposals were arrived at by the working group. In particular, the IGOs (through the GAC) had far greater participation, via Brian Beckham of WIPO and others, with only Jay Chapman of Digimedia (participating on behalf of the Business Constituency) as a voice for domain name owners. It is clear that the output of the working group reflects capture.

Continue reading “Unbalanced ICANN Working Group Participation Harms Domain Name Owners”

In a blog post last week, I sounded the alarm about a dangerous proposal from an ICANN working group which would have severe negative consequences for domain name owners, allowing IGOs (intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations) to engage in consequence-free reverse domain name hijacking.

After additional research and contemplation, it’s actually even worse than I imagined, and not just for domain name owners. It could create a system whereby an ICANN-developed arbitration system would handle employment disputes, trademark cancellation disputes, environmental disputes, sexual misconduct disputes, defamation actions, whistle-blower retaliation cases, copyright cases, and any other potential court actions, as long as an element of  the overall dispute related to domain names and alleged cybersquatting.  Continue reading “If ICANN Creates An Arbitration System, It Could Not Be Limited To Just Domain Name Disputes”