[ALAC] Revision of IGO/INGO Protections statement

[Hong Xue]

Defining the protection with the "No-harm" or "no-confusion" principle is
very essential to balance the interests of all parties. Quite a few
acronyms of IGO or INGO coincide with generic or descriptive terms, like
WHO for World Health Organization. Indiscriminately blocking measure would
have impact on FoE through domain name strings.

Hong



On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 2:09 PM, Alan Greenberg <alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca>wrote:

> 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
>
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>



-- 
Professor Dr. Hong Xue
Director of Institute for the Internet Policy & Law (IIPL)
Beijing Normal University
http://www.iipl.org.cn/
19 Xin Jie Kou Wai Street
Beijing 100875 China