Three large applicants to the new gTLD program sent a letter to ICANN yesterday to complaint about the Experts appointed by The Dispute Resolution Service Providers relating to the Community Objection process especially those at the ICC and asked ICANN to “ask all contracted arbitrators to temporarily suspend their decision making until ICANN can conduct a basic level of training for the actual Expert Panels on the AGB guidelines and their interpretations.”
“Only Experts who are successfully certified by ICANN as being thorough with the AGB should be allowed to preside over objections. This kind of a training process would ensure that there will be lesser appeals to the actual Expert Determinations going forward.”
Here is the entire letter that was sumitted to ICANN By Radix, Top Level Domain Holdings (TLDH) and Jay Westerdal’s Fegistry, LLC.
“Expert Panels appointed by the DRSPs for the purpose of providing an Expert Determination on each community objection are 3 degrees removed from ICANN.”
“They do not have any prior experience with the new gTLD program or a deep understanding of the Applicant Guidebook (“AGB”).”
“:We have reason to believe that although ICANN may have spent significant amounts of time working with the personnel at the DRSPs, particularly the International Chamber of Commerce (“ICC”), to make them thorough with the AGB, the requisite knowledge and understanding of the AGB has not percolated down to the actual Expert Panels appointed by the ICC.”
“This is evident from the three (3) publicly available Expert Determinations (.Architect, .Fly, and .Gay), which display varying interpretations of the AGB, and in some cases a blatant disregard of the most fundamental aspects of adjudging the objections and their responses.”
“Our assertion that the relevant Panels either lack sufficient knowledge of the AGB or have varying interpretations of the guidelines within it is also corroborated by the inconsistent results on the same String Confusion objections.”
“We sincerely request ICANN to take proactive steps to prevent a similar situation for Community objections, seeing as the results of the Community objections could be more grave that that of a String Confusion objections in that the former could result in an application being withdrawn entirely”
“We are disappointed to say the least with the material of the Expert Determination rendered by the Expert Panel on the community objections to .Architect and .Fly.”
“We highlight a few glaring discrepancies between the AGB and the Expert Determination below:”
“The Panel has ignored the clear definition of the word “community” in the AGB”
“As applicants who have collectively staked hundreds of thousands of dollars in this program, each of us considered the term “community” as defined by the AGB very carefully when making our decision regarding whether we should apply for specific strings as “community” applications or “standard” applications.”
“Each of us individually came to the conclusion that the generic strings that we intended to apply for do not fulfill the criteria specified in the AGB to qualify as a “community”.…
