U.S. government advises against giving additional protections to second level .wine and .vin domain names.
Lawrence Strickling, Administrator of the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), has sent a letter to ICANN regarding additional protections for .wine and .vin domain names.
Many governments have asked for additional safeguards around these domain names with protection for geographic names at the second level.
Strickling writes that the U.S. government does not believe additional protections, above what the ICANN board has already approved, are warranted.
…some governments have proposed that a select group of market participants, and potentially ICANN, agree to define bad faith very specifically: by instituting a presumption of bad faith where one country’s geographical indication is registered as a domain name by another country’s nationals. If ICANN were to approve this proposed approach as an additional safeguard, it would be putting itself in the position of creating new international precedent that would be inconsistent with many national legal regimes.
He notes that the U.S. government supports delegation of .wine and .vin without additional safeguards beyond the GAC advice already accepted by ICANN.
ICANN’s contract to manage the root zone of domain names (through Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) is managed by the NTIA.
Three companies applied for .wine and one for .vin.
Dillon Y. Clarke says
Since, the wine sector has made considerable efforts to interact with the candidates to find a solution to protect Geographical Indication (GI) wine names. A month has passed and all the candidates have given very vague answers to wine producers; none wanting at this stage to find concrete solutions. This is also the result of strong political pressure that are exerted to prevent an agreement to be reached. EFOW, the European federation of origin wines, has sent a letter to the ICANN Board asking for more time and to suspend all procedures leading to the extension of “.wine” and “.vin” strings until an agreement between the parties is found. EFOW recalls that it will support the extension of these domain names as soon as rules ensuring the protection of GI wine names will be defined. “The wine sector has strongly benefited from trade globalization and the development of the Internet. Nevertheless, there needs to be a minimum set of rules” says the President of EFOW, Mr. Riccardo Ricci Curbastro. “We know that some actors do not share this point of view and work to prevent the definition of rules, including the respect of Intellectual Property Rights. The success of these domain names relies heavily on the support of the sector. We are open to dialogue. However, if we are not listened to, we will not doubt to call for a boycott of these domain names and to take legal action”. The wine sector expects a strong signal from ICANN and the GAC.