Comments on Auction for Indirect Contention from Commercial Connect .shop

[Jeffrey Smith <jeffysmith@xxxxxxxxx>]

January 13, 2015

 

Commercial Connect, LLC. the senior application for .shop welcomes the
opportunity to comment on the proposed new gTLD auctions rules for indirect
contention.  While we also appreciate the time and effort taken by ICANN
staff and Power Auctions LLC, we also feel as do most commenters that
fundamental modifications still need to be made to the process in the
interest of fairness and parity towards all applicants.

 

The new gTLD Auction Rules for Indirect Contention is based on major
deviations from ICANN's mission, the definition of the internet itself as
well as the Applicant Guidebook.  In addition, this auction proposal is
grossly unfair to the certain applicants that have to bid in excess of the
combined bids of two other applicants.  

 

As a reminder, the Applicant Guidebook was to be used as a guide to ICANN's
policies and procedures.  It in no way replaces nor changes any of these
policies or procedures.

 

The basic misconception here is that indirect contention does exist in the
cases ICANN is referring to.  Whether or not indirect contention could exist
is not being addressed here.  It simply does not exist in the cases
addressed in this proposal.  

 

It has clearly been established and communicated to ICANN on literally
hundreds of occasions, by multiple factions and experts that the name
similarity issue was never properly addressed nor acted upon.  See
http://www.ecwr.net/showthread.php?9771-letters-to-ICANN 

 

As Sarah Falvey with Google Registry has commented, "ICANN has consistently
favored advancing applications over minimizing the risk of consumer
confusion.  A broad swath of the ICANN community has objected to this
prioritization, and the indirection contention set process is one of the
last opportunities to correct this prioritization."   

 

ICANN has continued to ignore the issue that, simply stated, TLD's are
Categories as stated in RFC 1592 it clearly discusses the concept of name
space as follows:  "Each of the generic TLD's was created for a general
category of organizations."   See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt 

 

For example, the general category of commerce, .Shop, .Store, Shopping, or
any other commerce related gTLD are to be considered one group.  In no
instance can any of the commerce TLD's co-exist as written in the policies
and procedures.  Therefore indirect contention cannot exist.

 

All of the applicants for a commerce gTLD should be grouped and treated as
one and the same whereby only one TLD can be allowed to exist.

 

As the senior applicant for .shop, Commercial Connect was forced to spend an
additional $200,000+ asking ICANN and the AAA to determine what commerce
strings had similar meanings simply because ICANN did not follow the GNSO
procedures on having a linguistics panel make this determination.  As is
evidenced today, this request was futile.  Domain name industry experts were
not used in making determinations and what resulted were inconsistent and/or
incoherent decisions.  We lost the Chinese idn version of .shop against our
English version of .shop stating that they did in fact mean the same but we
still lost.  It is now a separate contention set.  We won the Japanese idn
version of .store as the impartial decision maker clearly stated that it
could easily be confused with .shop.  We objected to the Chinese decision
stating that the guidelines speak of any similarity including visual, aural,
meaning and/or confusion and Amazon objected to our winning of .Store in
Japanese stating that if we lost the Chinese version then we should also
lose the similar Japanese string as well.  In this instance one or the other
objection should have clearly prevailed.  ICANN chose to simply ignore the
requests and refused to make a ruling on what similarity should be.
Hundreds of professionals spent thousands of hours in the past to define
name similarity and a simple  vague statement in the Applicant Guidebook
does not negate these set ICANN Policies.  ICANN has simply chose to ignore
this issue and continue their current course of chaos hoping that by
threatening delays, everyone would simply cave in and allow the injustice
and apparent gross negligence to continue.  Ignoring a problem only allows
it to become more pronounced in the future.

 

As of this date we have finally been invited to Community Priority
Evaluation and even though we have now worked over 15 years to help unify
and clearly establish an eCommerce community and have followed every ICANN
mandate to get the .shop delegation which we were promised in the 2000
round, it seems unlikely that we will pass this evaluation due to continued
manipulation of the system and certain biased parties working together to
make it virtually impossible.  Hitting a constant moving target, such as
ICANN's ever changing Community definition, becomes almost impossible when
so much money and manipulation is involved. 

 

If our application does end up in auction, this proposal states that not
only do we have to be the highest bidder, but our highest bid must now be
higher than the combined bid of two or more other bids.  How is this fair?  

 

On page 1-10 of the Applicant Guidebook it clearly states "For applications
identified as part of a contention set, the entire contention set will be
kept together in the same batch."  There should be no dividing of this set
and two entities in this set should not be allowed to get together and have
their bids considered to be twice as important any other applicant.  Nor
should ICANN base this issue on the simple issue that it would benefit ICANN
financially to have two TLD's in existence instead of one.  The real issue
here should be what benefits the stakeholders which include the end users.
ICANN has made enough out of this fiasco.  At some point ICANN needs to
remember who and what is important - the structure and stability of the
internet as well as the access and use ability for all users should always
be paramount.

 

In closing, while we do appreciate the time and effort expended in making
this proposal, we feel that the time would have been better spent on fixing
the issue on name similarity.  Having multiple TLD's in existence with fewer
than 100 registrants benefit no one.  We are against this auction proposal
and will continue to work with the community for a fair and equitable use of
new gTLDs which includes reminding ICANN and/or whomever may be allowed to
govern the internet of what a gTLD should be and what the word category
means.  We also urge ICANN to read and act upon the tremendous outcry
requesting them to step up and correct the domain name similarity issue by
following GNSO documented and annotated guidelines.

 

Sincerely,

 

Jeffrey Smith

CEO

Commercial Connect, LLC.

 

 

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Jeffrey Smith

President, Commercial Connect, LLC.

1418 South Third Street

Louisville, KY  40208-2117

(502) 636-3091 - (502) 634-1484 fax

(502) 235-3475 Cell

 <http://www.dotshop.com/> http://www.dotShop.com 

 

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Attachment: Commercial Connect Comments on Auction Proposal 2015Jan13.pdf
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