Open letter to ICANN from the Legal Counsels of intergovernmental organizations

[Alex Gakuru]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 11:10 AM, David Cake <dave at difference.com.au> wrote:

>
> 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.
>


For over 49 different IMF meanings, please have a look at
http://www.acronymfinder.com/IMF.html. At the bottom of the page "*Note: *We
have 200 other definitions for *IMF
<http://www.acronymattic.com/IMF.html>*in our Acronym Attic"  So who
should have an automatic right of ownership?

Alex
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-discuss/attachments/20111219/d76c372e/attachment-0001.html>