.BERLIN comment on Community and GAC Advice

[".berlin | Dirk Krischenowski" <krischenowski@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Sirs,

 

dotBERLIN GmbH & Co. KG, the applicant for the geographic name top-level
domain .BERLIN, welcomes and supports the GAC Advice as published on April
11, 2013, as the GAC Advice has been established in the Applicant Guidebook
as an instrument to reject gTLD applications which e.g. violate national
laws or do not recognize and incorporate public or community interests.

 

* We welcome and support the "Community Support for Applications" Provision

 

Section IV 1.e.: "The GAC advises the Board: i. that in those cases where a
community, which is clearly impacted by a set of new gTLD applications in
contention, has expressed a collective and clear opinion on those
applications, such opinion should be duly taken into account, together with
all other relevant information."

 

* The Interests of Communities and the Public need Protection

 

Our application for the string .BERLIN is a community-based application for
the very reason of the protection of the multiple interests of the community
and the public. The .BERLIN Community consists of multiple stakeholders from
the City of Berlin and beyond. We have been successfully working since 2005
on building long-lasting working relationships to the various stakeholders
including

 

1. Governmental organizations and authorities,

2. Commercial and non-commercial organisations, and

3. Citizens.

 

The community members have expressed a collective and clear supporting
opinion on our application by supporting documents. We have consulted with
all relevant public and private entities that make up the community.

 

* Sensitive gTLDs must have Safeguards

 

We welcome and support that the GAC has asked for multiple safeguards in its
GAC Advice.

 

We urge the GAC and the ICANN Board to accept and execute the
responsibilities they asked for in the Applicant Guidebook and which are
central to ICANN's core mission. Paragraph 4 of the Affirmation of
Commitments requires ICANN to "ensure that its decisions are in the public
interest, and not just the interest of a particular set of stakeholders".
Consequently, the Application Guide Book clearly gives preference to
applications that have the public interest of particular communities in
view.

 

Nevertheless we are aware that some elements of the GAC Advice need to be
more specific both with regard to the strings that they are targeted at and
with regard to their real life practicability. For instance, it poses
unnecessary or impossible burdens on applicants to identify regulatory
bodies for generic terms such as ONLINE or TOUR. Some other elements of the
GAC Advice seem to go beyond the GAC's mandate within the multi-stakeholder
model of ICANN and thus must be dealt with in the proper policy development
processes of this model.

 

Best regards,

Dirk Krischenowski
Founder and CEO
_______________________
dotBERLIN GmbH & Co. KG
Akazienstrasse 2
10823 Berlin
Germany
Tel +49 30 49782354
Fax +49 30 49782356
Mobile +49 173 2339156
E-Mail  <mailto:krischenowski@xxxxxxxxxxxx> krischenowski@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Skype "krischenowski"
Web  <http://www.dotberlin.com/> www.dotberlin.com