Fwd: [council] Final Issue Report on the Current State of the UDRP

[Andrew A. Adams]

Wendy Seltxzer wrote, quoting ICANN staff:
> Council just received this report in which staff reiterate their
> recommendation against UDRP review, and suggest a "group of experts"
> implementation recommendations instead.
> 
> 
> > While periodic assessment of policies can be beneficial to guard
> > against unexpected results or inefficient process, the GNSO Council
> > should consider the perspective of the majority of the ICANN
> > community, and the advice of the Government Advisory Committee (GAC),
> > and the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), with regard to whether
> > such review is necessary or warranted. Although properly within the
> > scope of the GNSO’s mandate, Staff recommends that a PDP on the UDRP
> > not be initiated at this time. Staff recommends that a PDP be delayed
> > until after the New gTLD Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS) has
> > been in operation for at least eighteen months. Doing so would allow
> > the policy process to be informed by data regarding the effectiveness
> > of the URS, which was modelled on the UDRP, to address the problem of
> > cybersquatting. 
> 
> However, if the GNSO Council determines that the UDRP
> > should be reviewed immediately, Staff suggests that the GNSO Council
> > consider alternatives to commencing a PDP for addressing this issue.
> > After carefully evaluating the issues and concerns expressed by the 
> > ICANN community regarding the UDRP, many of those concerns relate to
> > process issues associated with the implementation of the UDRP, rather
> > than the language of the policy itself. The GNSO Council should
> > consider, in lieu of commencing a PDP, recommending that ICANN
> > convene a small group of experts representing the different community
> > viewpoints to produce recommendations to improve the process or
> > implementation of the UDRP policy as an initial step. These “expert”
> > process recommendations, to the extent they target changes in the
> > behavior of the UDRP providers, could be implemented after they are 
> > recommended by the GNSO Council, and approved by the ICANN Board. If
> > after consideration of such expert recommendations, there continues
> > to be a desire to conduct a more thorough review of the UDRP, or if
> > the recommendations are intended to affect the obligations of the
> > contracted parties, the GNSO Council could subsequently initiate a
> > more focused PDP at that time.
> 
> We should think about how we'd like to respond. I do not think a "group
> of experts" is a fair or suitable alternative to review.

The UDRP is clearly a significant plank of ICANN policy in one of its core 
areas of competence. Forget much of what ICANN tries badly to do in empire 
building. Running the IP address allocation (hasn't that been a blast with 
IPv4 allocations running out before IPv6 was broadly adopted) and running the 
domain name resolution system are the primary roles of ICANN. UDRP is one of 
the most important (and badly broken) elements of that system. So the staff 
thinks that the primary mechanism for policy development should be bypassed 
when reviewing one of the most important elements of one of ICANN's two core 
missions? Absolutely ridiculous. A PDP is clearly needed since it was the 
lack of such inclusive processes that led to the current broken, biased UDRP 
in the first place. The URS has sufficiently different needs (there are only 
a few organisations and almost no individuals who will put up minimum 
$100,000 dollars to run a TLD yet there are billions who could afford the $10 
to register a domain name for a year) that waiting for it to be in operation 
for eighteen months before reviewing the UDRP is simply another delay in 
fixing a broken system that has damaged the Internet for a decade.


-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/