[gnso-igo-ingo] Thoughts on fact-based policy development
Both I and the ALAC in its recent statement have stated that if we are going to take the large and unusual step and provide special protection to IGO/INGO names, we should do so understanding what problem(s) we are trying to solve and have a high level of comfort that the proposed solution actually will address these problems. To take a large number of character strings out of circulation, or at least put in place significant (no doubt both costly and time-consuming) hurdles to using these strings without a substantive benefit is counter to the culture that has allowed the Internet to thrive. Moreover, it sets the stage for even more similar requests in the future, both on the basis of TMs and "public money". To date, we have seen virtually no data related to IGOs and little related to INGOs on the problems they currently suffer that would be relieved with the reservation or blocking of their requested exact-match names and acronyms. To try to get a feel for whether this is just an obstreperous objection or really has merit, I undertook a small and not necessarily representative study of the names of a number of organizations. Specifically NATO, ITU, UPU, CERN, WHO, ILO, UNICEF and RedCross. All except the last two were signatories of the letter requesting protection for IGO names (recently resent to this group along with the UPU statement appended to the RySG input, but which also can be found at http://www.icann.org/en/news/correspondence/igo-counsels-to-beckstrom-et-al-13dec11-en.pdf). I checked to see whether their names were registered in a number of TLDs, specifically int, com, net, org, info, biz, us, ca and eu, who they were registered to, and what use was being made of the domain name (from a web point of view). The results are attached. - Lines highlighted in Dark blue are used by the organization in question (or an affiliate). Light blue are sort of used by them, but is not actually an active web site, or is used in a rather curious way, or is seemingly owned by a private individual who redirects the site as a matter of courtesy. - Lines highlighted in dark green seem to be legitimate uses of the name but not by the organization in question. There is a pale green entry that would be reasonable except it is largely a monetization site. There are large number of monetized pages, and a fair number of uses of names for which I can see no rationale at all. In no cases has any of the organizations in question taken control of all of the names. For the first few, I also did a reviews search on the e-mail admin contact address listed in the Whois, as some measure of how many other domain names are managed by that organization. The short answer is "not many" for those that I looked at. I stopped when my free access to the reviews whois engine was cut off. This was an interesting exercise, but as stated earlier, there is no pretense of this being a definitive analysis. But it does bring into question just how important the requested reservations are, what uses would such reservations rule out if implemented as complete blocking, and what harms will be prevented by their implementation. I strongly suggest that at the least, we request specific information from the organizations that have explicitly requested protection (at the very least RCRC, IOC, and the organizations identified in the 13Dec11 letter). This should include: - A list of TLDs in which they have registered their requested names, or otherwise taken action to prevent them being registered by others. - Identification of any disputes over identical names, names that would have been disallowed if the requested policy had been in place for all gTLDs, and the outcomes of these disputes. - Identification/elaboration of the harms caused by the above cases.- An estimate of the magnitude of these cases compared to other domain name conflicts which will not be prevented by the requested gTLD protections. Lastly, I would suggest that we ask whether they would:- Expect exceptions to the reservation of their names to allow their own registration of the names - How they contemplate allowing exceptions for the legitimate use by others of the names. Alan Attachment:
IGO-INGO-Review.pdf
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