Category Archive

By Philip S. Corwin, ICA Counsel The 59th ICANN meeting was held in Johannesburg, South Africa from June 25th to 29th. Under ICANN’s new meeting schedule this mid-year gathering is the somewhat shorter “B” session devoted to intensive policy development work. This report details my engagement as ICA Counsel on your behalf and current and expected benefits to ICA members. …

The Proposed Renewal of the .Net Registry Agreement (RA) was published for public comment by ICANN on April 20th. The biggest surprise about the proposed contract is how little it differs from the current one between ICANN and Verisign. Conspicuously absent from the agreement is the new gTLD rights protection mechanism (RPM) of Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS). For the past …

ICA fully supported the insistence of ICANN’s community that the IANA Transition had to be accompanied by substantial improvements in ICANN Accountability. Some of those improvements were deemed to be necessary preconditions to the Transition. They included substantial revisions of ICANN’s Bylaws to reflect new community powers, such as the ability to veto budgets or remove Board members. Those were …

ICA has long been on record that it was an inappropriate usurpation of the GNSO’s policymaking role for ICANN Global Domain Division (GDD) staff to be urging legacy gTLD registry operators to adopt Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) in the course of renewal negotiations for their registry agreements (RAs). That’s because the URS was adopted as an “implementation detail” for new …

Executive Summary: The Copyright UDRP proposal unveiled two weeks ago in the Domain Name Association’s Healthy Domains Initiative has been placed on indefinite hold and is unlikely to be revived as a DNA initiative. Public Interest Registry announced on February 23rd that it was pausing its development of the plan and will not revive it absent further notice. One day …

On Wednesday, our fellow trade association, the Domain Name Association (DNA), announced the rollout of its “Healthy Domains Initiative” (HDI).  The ICA joins the DNA in seeking solutions for stopping online abuse.  However, the ICA is particularly concerned  about its proposed remedy to combat online copyright infringement. The HDI proposes to establish a “Copyright ADRP” with the power to order …

On February 1st the ICA filed its comment letter  with ICANN opposing the inclusion of the URS in the .Mobi renewal registry agreement. Once again we were joined in this position by ICANN’s Business Constituency (BC), and opposed by the Intellectual Property Constituency and the International Trademark Association. We have seen this movie before. We took the same position on …

Yesterday, in an article published at CircleID.com, our fellow trade group the Domain Name Association (DNA) announced the rollout of its Healthy Domains Initiative (HDI). DNA was established concurrent with the launch of the new gTLD program, and primarily represents new gTLD registries as well as some registrars, but not registrants (including domain investors and developers). ICA and DNA share …