[ALAC] Revision of IGO/INGO Protections statement

[Alan Greenberg]

After reviewing the paper submitted by Jovan Kurbalija 
(http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/alac/2013/002781.html), I 
have made a number of revisions to the draft ALAC statement at 
https://community.icann.org/x/5IFQAg.

The changes cover the following issues:

1. Make it explicit that we want IGOs and INGOs to be given special 
protection only after a careful evaluation of their specific issues 
and needs. This was already implied by our specifying that they had 
to demonstrate need and to meet a number of other criteria.

2. We had already said that some of the suggested IOC protections 
were over broad because they propose a world-wide Internet blocking 
of a name that might have previously been protected in a only small 
number of countries. A new paragraph generalized that to IGOs 
pointing out that an IGO can exist with only three countries signing 
a treaty, and that is not sufficient for requesting global protection.

3. Jovan's paper had reasonably included that a rationale for 
requesting protection could be that some entity could do an 
organization great harm and thus endanger the public interest by 
using their name in a domain name. We had only included user-related 
issues, so I added this one as well. It is not likely to have many 
real applications, but is a reasonable addition.

The rest of the statement, in my opinion, is generally in line with 
Jovan's recommendations. If others feel differently, please let us 
know your concerns. Due to time constraints, I have not reviewed 
these changes with Evan, but have no doubt he will speak up if he has 
a problem with any of them.

A Redline PDF is attached to the Wiki page so you can see the exact changes.

One more thing that I have thought of doing but would welcome input 
on, is to add a preamble saying that these "special protections" are 
in effect global blocking of specific names, a concept that ICANN and 
the Internet has generally avoided, and specifically has refused when 
requested by the IP and Business communities. If ICANN if going to 
offer such protections to IGOs and INGOs, we need to make sure that 
there are real harms if we do not do so, and that the protections 
will in fact prohibit such harms.

As it stands now, we have little evidence of such harms, particularly 
for IGOs, and we have little evidence that protecting exact matches 
only will be of significant help.

Alan