[ncdnhc-discuss] Fw: [council] GAC and country name reservations

[YJ Park]

Dear members,

Philip, NC chair, asked views from each constituency regarding
country name reservations. Please, unfold your views.

Taking this opportunity, I want to share my concern in "country
names in other IDN character sets" reservation practice without
proper consultation process.

DNSO/ICANN has been providing its views regarding English and
Latin based domain names which this community has believed to
have expertise on this.

However, as many of us have admitted DNSO/ICANN at this current
stage cannot be recognized to provide such an expertise yet. In light
of this, WIPO cannot be recognized as such to provide expertise in
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Cyrillic, etc
either.

There should be more efforts to be made to bridge existing gaps
between the ASCII domain name stakeholders and Non-latin domain
name stakeholders.

Regards,
YJ

----- Original Message -----
From: Philip Sheppard
To: NC (list)
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2001 11:56 PM
Subject: [council] GAC and country name reservations


In a communiqué made by the Government Advisory Council at its Montevideo
meeting http://www.icann.org/committees/gac/communique-09sep01.htm "the GAC
recommends that the names of countries and distinct economies, particularly
those contained in the ISO 3166-1 standard, as applied by ICANN in
identifying ccTLDs, should be reserved by the .info Registry, (or if
registered in the Sunrise Period challenged by the Registry and, if
successful, then reserved) in Latin characters in their official language(s)
and in English and assigned to the corresponding governments and public
authorities, at their request, for use. These names in other IDN character
sets should be reserved in the same way as soon as they become available"
In the same communiqué the GAC further "draws the attention of ICANN and the
Registries to the fact that a large number of other names, including
administrative sub-divisions of countries and distinct economies as
recognised in international fora, may give rise to contested registrations.
Accordingly the GAC recommends that Registrars and eventual Registrants
should be made aware of this".
---------------------------------------
I believe that the NC should issue a statement about this and ask you to
consult in your constituencies rapidly. I currently propose that we could
consider:
- urging caution on the GAC in taking this step,
- point out that dot info is but the start of a TLD expansion and something
much more interesting for countries could be possible
- propose that WIPO is the best place for discussion on geographical names.

Comments please.
Philip
NC Chair