The New gTLD Applicant Group (NTAG) submitted comments today regarding ICANN staff’s “strawman proposal,” made in response to the IPC/BC quest for additional new rights protection mechanisms (RPMs).
“”NTAG is a group of applicants operating under the umbrella of the Registry Stakeholder Group. NTAG is a diverse group of over 90 members accounting for nearly half of all new gTLD applications. More than 50% of our members applied for only one TLD. “”
“Collectively we have paid ICANN in excess of $170 million in application fees and expect the timely resolution of the ICANN application review process”.
“As expressed in our previous letter on the RPM issue a strong consensus of our membership does not support last-minute material changes to the RPMs in the Applicant Guidebook (AGB), which reflect a community-wide consensus.
“In addition, NTAG opposes any implementation of new RPMs that would apply only to new gTLDs and not to existing gTLDs”.
“The NTAG is supportive of a bottom-up policy development process that would review the costs and benefits of proposed RPMs that would apply to all TLDs.”
“NTAG does not support layering on additional RPMs that apply only at the time of launch of a TLD. ”
“The existing and powerful RPMs in the AGB have been agreed to through the multi-stakeholder process and memorialized in the application agreement between ICANN and applicants. Absent strong and broad community support, these existing RPMs should not be tampered with by ICANN staff.
There can be no doubt that the strawman proposal represents changes to policy rather than implementation of decided policy. ”
“As such, community support through the GNSO, ICANN’s gTLD policy arm, is required. ”
“Moreover, under the terms of the AGB, because the proposals would have significant impact on applicants, the applicant community should be supportive before ICANN attempts to change such agreements and any negative impacts must be mitigated by ICANN.
“The Process
It is a mischaracterization to label the BC/IPC proposals as “community based.”
“A small subset of the GNSO may have been consulted, but the proposals themselves were narrowly driven. Use of the word “consensus” to describe agreement between two of many GNSO groups is different from broad community support. Similarly, the strawman proposal was not agreed to or approved by the community at ICANN staff’s consultation with representative community members. It has come from the staff and not the community”.
“New and “enhanced” RPMs should have GNSO Council support to be considered at this stage and should apply to all TLDs.
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