Open letter to ICANN from the Legal Counsels of intergovernmental organizations

[David Cake]

On 19/12/2011, at 2:22 PM, William Drake wrote:

> Hi
> 
> As expected, the UN and other public intergovernmental organizations are now demanding that their names and acronyms be protected---not only at the top, but the second level as well—"Consistent with the rationale for protection envisaged for the important causes represented by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the International Olympic Committee."  The door has been opened, why wouldn't they want to go through it?   
> 
> The letter is attached below.  Kieren has an article on this at http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/12/14/igos-special-gtld-exemption.  While I agree with him that there is no chance of a TLD application with an international organization's name or acronym making it through the application process anyway, that the second level demand is problematic, and that the guidebook mechanisms would seem sufficient, it's not obvious that ICANN can easily tell these organizations to just chill out and expect them to go away.

	IMF, to take one example, is a three letter acronym that also can mean a mapping form (so IMF.map, for example, would seem a reasonable 2LD), a fictional spy agency (the Impossible Mission Force), and a publicly listed company in Australia specialising in litigation (who would probably strongly object to them not being able to even bid for imf.com or imf.law), and scientific term for the Interplanetary Magnetic Field (so imf.space or imf.science or imf.astro etc). The idea that a TLA deserves special protection at the 2LD level is ridiculous, and characteristic of a level of cluelessness. 
	We should try pretty hard to lobby the GAC that his not get consensus support, IMO. Our best chance to give ICANN an easy reason to reject this nonsense.  


> 
> On last Thursday's Council call Wolfgang and I raised questions about how GNSO & ICANN would deal with this.  There's a GNSO group being formed to work on the RC & IOC, but apparently no consideration of expanding its remit at this time.  Clearly, there will have to be a broader discussion about the relative merits of transforming the Reserved Names list into a broad "rights protection" mechanism. GAC has argued that reserving RC & IOC are required by ICANN's public interest mandate; presumably we'll be hearing the same here.  The intersection of the DNS and state-related claims raises a host of issues which NC may wish to consider and weigh in on.
	
	The GNSO should absolutely not throw this issue in with RC and IOC issues IMO, and should come out fairly strongly against this idea that the Reserved Name should be expanded on a general public interest idea.
	Cheers
		David
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