The ICANN Board and its Government Advisory Committee (GAC) spent three days in Brussels discussing the implementation of the new gTLD policy.  Prior to the meeting the GAC provided a “scorecard”, with their list of concerns, to the ICANN Board.  The list contained 12 primary issues that encapsulated a total of 80 sub points.  At the meeting ICANN presented a summary of its position and reasoning on each point, and expressed willingness to compromise in some areas. 

 Of the 80 sub points, ICANN responded that their position was either consistent with the GAC’s advice on 25 of the sub points or consistent with GAC’s advice with some revisions needed on 28 of the sub points.   There remain 27 sub points for further discussion with the GAC over two days in San Francisco during the next ICANN meeting of 12-18 March 2011.

 Of interest to major trademark owners included:

  • an agreement that the GAC as a whole will be able to review the new gTLD applications and provide early advice to the ICANN Board prior to the assessment of the new gTLD application by the ICANN Board,
  • that the clearinghouse could store marks other than registered trademarks for potential use by registries,
  • that any registered trademark can be used in a sunrise process or URS proceeding, provided that information on use of the trademark is provided to the clearinghouse, 
  • that during the Intellectual Property (IP) claims procedure, a rights holder will be informed once an applicant has acknowledged an IP claim and submitted an application for a name during a registry start-up process,
  • that a word limit of 5000 words will be replaced with a word limit of 500 words for a complainant in an IP claims process,
  • an examiner will not be required to consider possible defences from a domain name registrant’s perspectives when assessing a URS proceeding,
  • ICANN will provide additional resources for the contractual compliance function for registries and registrars

 The GAC expressed a need for more time to discuss and consider the issues and included in their written response to the ICANN Board “The GAC is committed to taking whatever time is required to achieving (these) essential public policy objectives”.   The ICANN Board stated that the meeting in San Francisco will be on resolving the remaining areas of contention and signal the “final stages in (our) consultations”.   

 The impact on timing will likely be that a new version of the guidebook may be published sometime in April that incorporates changes agreed between the ICANN Board and the GAC, along with other changes resulting from the public comment process on the guidebook published in November 2010.  

 The summary prepared by the GAC to the ICANN Board from the Brussels’ meeting can be accessed here>

The summary of the Board’s response can be found here>