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 these Global Domain Division (GDD) shenanigans for the 2015 renewals of the legacy .Cat, .Pro, and .Travel domains. When ICANN staff ignored our arguments and went ahead with making policy decisions through closed door contract negotiations we even filed a formal Request for Reconsideration with the Board, as did the BC and the Non-Commercial Users Constituency. We lost on that too.
Those 2015 negotiations took place before the GNSO Council chartered the working group to review all Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPMs) in all gTLDs. As we pointed out in the .Mobi letter:
The 2016 launch of the PDP Review of All Rights Protection Mechanisms in All gTLDs, which is tasked with recommending whether new gTLD RPMs should become Consensus Policy for legacy gTLDs under its GNSO Council-approved Charter, makes it particularly inappropriate for GDD staff to continue seeking that de facto policy result in non-transparent, bilateral RA negotiations that contravene the policymaking process set forth in the Bylaws.
The .Mobi RA, like the recent revision of the .XXX RA, also provides the registry with a substantial reduction in its registry fees, resulting in the unseemly appearance that the registry was bribed to adopt the URS. But as ICANN is seemingly incapable of embarrassment, the ICANN Board just approved that .XXX RA on February 3rd, giving its standard boilerplate rationalization that “inclusion of the Uniform Rapid Suspension was agreed to through bilateral negotiations between the applicable Registry Operator and ICANN”. Nobody was in that negotiating room representing domain registrants when ICM Registry obtained nearly $300,000 per year in financial benefits in exchange for its “voluntary” adoption of the URS at .XXX.
So why does ICA keep beating its head against the ICANN wall in decrying this seamy GDD practice? Because it’s the right thing to do on behalf of our members, and because ICANN needs to be called out every time GDD staff improperly use their superior leverage to push policy decisions through contract negotiations and usurp the role of the community.
And also because the .Net RA is up for renewal in a few months, and whether or not the URS should be available at the number two gTLD is a matter of central import for its 15.2 million domain registrants and should not be decided in a back room. As we gear up to review that proposed .Net RA, we’ll continue to engage in dialogue with other members of the ICANN community who share our concerns, and keep exploring whether there are alternative, more effective means to return policy decisions to that community. We will keep fighting the good fight so long as ICANN staff keeps overstepping their proper bounds.