[gnso-igo-ingo] Protections for INGO names

["Claudia MACMASTER TAMARIT" <MACMASTER@xxxxxxx>]

Dear Thomas and colleagues,

We welcome this opportunity to continue deliberations on special protection of 
INGO identifiers, and thus jointly respond with the following proposal.



1.  We strongly support a grant of special protections at the top and second 
level for certain INGOs.  And we believe there may be wider support in the WG 
for this, in particular when we focus on so-called weaker protections.



Just like other private entities, INGOs face the almost certain risk of 
increased abuse of their names/acronyms as more top-level domains enter the 
domain name system.  However, unlike other private entities, non-profit INGOs 
with global public missions (including well-known INGOs) are unacceptably 
vulnerable when it comes to battling the increasing potential and impact of 
cybersquatting.  In contrast to private corporations, INGOs often lack the 
mandate, funds, resources and expertise to face this mounting risk.  (Some 
might point to current levels of INGO participation in ICANN processes as 
confirming the same.)  And where INGOs do somehow fight instances of 
cybersquatting, the fight can come at the cost of diverting (often public) 
resources away from serving the global community.  Interestingly, that global 
public service includes helping to make technology and communication, the 
Internet and the domain name system easier and safer for all to use.



That being said, we also stress the importance of balancing the interests of 
protecting certain INGO names/acronyms with the interests of other people and 
entities who may lawfully and legitimately use abbreviations and words that 
happen to exactly match those names/acronyms.





2.  As such, it is with the intention to reduce the risk of cybersquatting 
faced by INGOs with global public missions that we propose the below criteria 
and special protections:



To be granted special protection, an INGO should apply to ICANN and demonstrate 
all of the following criteria are satisfied:

                                 i.            The INGO benefits from some 
privileges, immunities or other protections in law on the basis of the INGO's 
proven (quasi-governmental) international status*;

                               ii.            The INGO enjoys existing legal 
protection (including trademark protection) for its name/acronym in over 50+ 
countries or in three (of six) ICANN regions;

                              iii.            The INGO engages in recognized 
global public work shown by;

a.       inclusion on the General Consultative Status of the UN ECOSOC list, or

b.      membership of 50+ national representative entities, which themselves 
are governmental/ public agencies or non-governmental organizations that each 
fully and solely represent their respective national interests in the INGO's 
work and governance.



With a mind to areas where we saw greater support, we recommend special 
protections along the lines of the following:



Top-level

·         Fee waiver (or objection funding) for objections filed to gTLDs/ 
Top-Levels.

·         Any other technical or financial assistance as may be appropriately 
developed.**



Second-Level

·         Unlimited time period for TMCH claims notices being sent to 
applicants of exact match registrations, copied to the INGO.

·         Any other technical or financial assistance as may be appropriately 
developed, including for registration in the TMCH.**





3.  Although it may have been preferable to have developed objective criteria 
under which all IGOs and INGOs may qualify, we do not believe that development 
and adoption of the above (or like) proposal would be misaligned with 
development of such criteria for other international organizations, namely 
IGOs, the IOC, and the RCRC organizations.



In any eventual recommendation, caution is warranted in proposing any scheme 
that does not carefully and appropriately balance the rights and legitimate 
interests of all international organizations and the rights and legitimate 
interests of the global public, which they may serve.

We hope this proposal is sufficiently concrete and balances the relevant 
interests so there may be ground for support in this WG and the broader 
community for this or similar proposals that may protect the names/acronyms of 
global INGOs with public missions.

Sincerely,

Guilaine and Claudia


Guilaine Fournet (Ms)
Head of Sales and Business Development

[International Electrotechnical Commission]<http://www.iec.ch/>
IEC - International Electrotechnical Commission | Rue de Varembé 3 | P.O. Box 
131 | CH-1211 Geneva 20 | Switzerland | tel: +41 22 919 0261 | skype: 
iec-gnf<skype:iec-gnf?userinfo> | twitter<http://twitter.com/gnf_iec> | 
linkedin<http://www.linkedin.com/in/fournet> | website<http://www.iec.ch/>


Claudia MacMaster Tamarit
Intellectual Property Rights Manager
[cid:image003.png@01CE4815.93D0C990]




* For example, both the IEC<http://www.iec.ch/> (International Electrotechnical 
Commission) and ISO<http://www.iso.org/iso/home.html> (International 
Organization for Standardization) are formally recognized as quasi-governmental 
international organizations and granted certain fiscal privileges under Swiss 
law.  While several dozen INGOs are headquartered in Switzerland, only a 
handful have qualified for protection under this law.  There may of course be 
other laws (unidentified here) which protect some aspect of an INGO in 
recognition of its international work and status which may be the basis for 
satisfaction of this first criterion.



**This placeholder may also include other carefully crafted protection 
mechanisms, including flexibly blocking registration of INGO names/acronyms 
from would-be cyber squatters while not restricting rights holders and 
legitimate users from lawfully and expeditiously registering terms/words that 
happen to coincide.  This is proving difficult.  Requiring an INGO (or others) 
to dedicate resources to reviewing and granting permissions to potentially 
voluminous requests (with consideration to the legal implications and 
commercial needs of legitimate third party users) is unadvisable.  As in turn, 
would be imposing undue restrictions and procedural burdens on other legitimate 
users and rights holders in seeking to lawfully register terms/words that 
happened to be exact matches of protected names/acronyms.

--- Begin Message ---

• To: "gnso-igo-ingo@xxxxxxxxx" <gnso-igo-ingo@xxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: [gnso-igo-ingo] Protections for INGO names
• From: Thomas Rickert <rickert@xxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:25:32 +0000

All,
as you know, we have gained momentum around a proposal and a series of 
protection recommendations of identifiers for the IOC, RCRC, and IGOs.  From 
the onset it became clear that all four groups had to be considered 
individually given the varying nature of the organizations in question.

Some of you have reminded me and the group that the INGO designations are not 
covered by the RySG proposal, which has been the basis of our recent 
discussions.

To complete our charter and work effort, it is now time for the WG to continue 
deliberations on protection of INGO identifiers and the following is an effort 
to determine the level of support by the WG.  Please provide responses to the 
mail list with the following aspects to consider:

1)      Is there general support by WG members for protecting certain INGOs?
2)      If so, what qualification criteria should be used?
3)      If qualification criteria were defined, would the proposed INGO 
protection align to our current proposals of the IGO, IOC, and RCRC 
organizations?

We can certainly base our discussions on the findings of our previous work, but 
it is my impression that no proposal on criteria for INGOs has been made so far 
that got substantial traction. Please use this opportunity to take this forward 
and please do come up with concrete language for proposals that the group can 
then discuss.

Thanks,
Thomas

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