RE: [gnso-pro-wg] NEW APPROACH TO WORK OF WG

["Mike Rodenbaugh" <mxr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I appreciate the foresight of Jeff and Mike P. in projecting what
everyone else in the community will collectively say in response to the
proposed questionnaire.  They may indeed be correct, but I think our
analysis will be much stronger if we take opinions from anyone who wants
to give them, beyond two experts representing registry interests.

 

As for Tim's issue about collecting fact vs. opinion, that is quite a
hazy line and seems obvious to me that we want to collect opinion
primarily, along with some hard facts.  I see no reason for two distinct
surveys, and think we should push forward with this questionnaire,
appropriately labeled as a non-scientific survey designed to provide
rough input into our WG analysis.

 

Given the timeframe for our work, we will need to begin discussing these
issues as a WG without benefit of the results of the questionnaire.  

 

Mike Rodenbaugh

Sr. Legal Director

Yahoo! Inc.

 

  _____  

From: owner-gnso-pro-wg@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-gnso-pro-wg@xxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Neuman, Jeff
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 7:20 AM
To: gnso-pro-wg@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: [gnso-pro-wg] NEW APPROACH TO WORK OF WG

 

A number of us are struggling with trying to come up with a perfect
questionnaire to send out to obtain data.  However, don't we really
already know what answers we are going to get from the questions? 

 

As a registry that has introduced (either directly or indirectly)
several new TLDs including .biz, .us and .travel among others, I
personally believe the results of the questionnaire will show that:

 

1)       Trademark owners and businesses believe some sort intellectual
property rights mechanism is needed in the introduction of new gTLDs.  

2)       Any mechanism that is introduced should take all steps possible
to minimize fraudulent or abusive domain name registrations during the
launch process.

3)       Each of the processes introduced prior, whether Sunrise or IP
claim, had issues with their implementation and these issues need to be
resolved for any future launch.  Implementation issues involve (a)
verification of claims/registrations, (b) dispute resolution mechanisms,
(c) which marks are deserving of protections, etc.

4)       Registries believe that the existing mechanisms are too costly
(both in terms of business, operations, support and legal) and present a
burden to introducing new gTLDs.

5)       Defensive Registrations are issues both to trademark owners and
to domain name registries.  For trademark owners and businesses,
defensive registrations can amount to a significant cost to their
companies and to registries, purely defensive registrations do nothing
to enhance the utility of the new TLD - they merely cerate a carbon copy
of other TLDs.  Contrary to what some believe IP Launch processes are
not a boon to registries and amount for a small insignifanct portion of
the total domains registered in a particular TLD.

 

Given the facts above, which I believe most would concede in some form,
shouldn't we focus on creatively brainstorming new solutions to these
issues (and there may be others), rather than spending our time on a
survey/questionnaire where we already know the outcome.

 

Maybe this is too radical, but I thought I would toss it out there.

 

Jeffrey J. Neuman, Esq. 
Sr. Director, Law, Advanced Services  & Business Development 

NeuStar, Inc. 
Loudoun Tech Center 
46000 Center Oak Plaza 
Sterling, VA 20166 
p: (571) 434-5772 
f: (571) 434-5735 
e-mail: Jeff.Neuman@xxxxxxxxxx <mailto:Jeff.Neuman@xxxxxxxxxx>  

 

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