Corrected version: comment to TMCH services draft report

[Marilia Maciel <mariliamaciel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Please, accept the corrected version below.


Dear Antonietta, dear staff members,

You will find below a comment to the independent review of the TMCH
services draft report. Please, accept our apologies for the slight delay in
sending this contribution. We hope that you will still be able to consider
it.

With our best regards,
Edward Morris
Marilia Maciel - chair of NCSG PC


We thank the Analysis Group and its research team for their close review of
the questions sent to them by the GAC and their work to consult widely
within the ICANN and trademark communities. We recommend that the Final
Report (with as few edits as possible) be delivered to both the GAC and the
RPM PDP WG which is looking at these issues. The results of this
independent review well address the questions and concerns raised by the
GAC. The Final Report should not be edited because there is little to edit
- this is the independent report of an independent group. We ask that the
Draft Report be made into the Final Report and delivered as quickly as
possible to the GAC and also the Rights Protection Mechanism PDP Working
Group so they can review and work with the data, analysis and findings.



We request that the 3 key findings of the Analysis Group as highlighted by
ICANN in its public announcement of this report (www.icann.org/news/
announcement-2016-07-25-en) be highlighted in the delivery of the Analysis
Group's Final report to the GAC:

1) Expanding Matching Criteria to include non-exact matches may be of
limited benefit: The dispute rate of completed registrations that are
variations of trademark strings is very low; 2) Extending the Trademark
Claims Service may have diminishing value: Registrations of names matching
trademarks decline after the required 90-day Claims service period ends; 3)
Few trademark holders utilize the Sunrise period: Most users of the
Trademark Clearinghouse submit proof of use to gain access to the Sunrise
period. However, across eligible trademark holders, fewer than 20 percent
have used the Sunrise period to date.



We note our deep concern with one of the findings of the Analysis Group -
that 93.7% of the 1.8 million registration attempts that received a Claims
Service notification were abandoned, and only 6.3% went on to complete the
domain registration (p.16). This indicates a huge problem for ordinary
registrants, and a further deep and pressing question: when nine of the top
ten most accessed trademark strings in the TMCH are ordinary words, opening
letters of the English alphabets, and the locations of millions of people -
SMART, HOTEL, ONE, LOVE, CLOUD, NYC, LONDON, ABC, and LUXURY - should we
really be granting monopolies to one or a few companies?



Lastly, a more general point relates to the expensive nature of the TMCH
service. Although trademark owners contribute with most of the costs, some
of them are also imposed on registrars and registrants as well. Questions
remain about whether this kind of preemptive protection is really needed.


Edward Morris
Marilia Maciel