Late submission: .post agreement amendment

[Vika Mpisane <vika@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Kurt,

Assuming this is not too late?

The UPC's requested amendments raise an interesting dilemma because as an
already existing gTLD its argument may well be premised from the fact that
at least some of the existing gTLDs (e.g. Com, net, org) were allowed to
accept registrations such as za.com, za.net and za.org ­ when in fact ZA is
South Africa's ccTLD. Nothing also prevents us at ZA from having a post.za
2nd level domain. The UPC may be arguing for what they may perceive to be
"fair" and "equal" treatment.

However, the fact that UPC signed the agreement in the first place wherein
it undertook not to register IANA-reserved domain strings counts against
UPC's argument. There is that old Latin principle of law to the effect that
a signatory accepts the contents of what s/he signs (of course, UPC is not
claiming they didn't understand what they signed for in the first place).
UPC should then be held to this principle. Such an approach is in agreement
with the policy ICANN advocates in the new gTLD Applicant Guidebook, which
requires new gTLD applicants not to accept registrations of IANA & other
names.

It seems that ICANN should consider (may be post the new gTLD evaluation
era?) to amend the gTLD agreements to allow 2nd level registration of
reserved names where an appropriate authority (over that name) consents to
the 2nd level registration. For example, if ZADNA consents to or requests
registration of za.music, then the .music registry operator should be
allowed to accept such a registration. Same thing if the Kenyan Government
wants kenya.africa, the .africa registry operator should be allowed to
accept such a registration.

Regards,

Vika Mpisane
ZADNA
Tel: +27 11 314 0077