New TLD applicants’ disdain for the GAC must be growing.
The Governmental Advisory Committee has released its Durban Communiqué (pdf), summarizing what it did during this week’s meeting in Durban and its advice to ICANN’s board.
Even as someone who’s not directly involved with new TLD applications, I have to admit I got angry reading the Communiqué.
I think this sums up my reaction:
Just who do these guys think they are?
It’s almost as if the GAC knows they’re making crazy demands, but they’re requesting them with a straight face.
Consider that the GAC now wants to create a mechanism that’s a cross between the Trademark Clearinghouse and a preemptive UDRP for any acronym of an intergovernmental organization that someone wants to register.
Or that it demanded that applications for .wine and .vin should be put on on hold for another 30 days while the GAC figures out what it wants to do with these generic domains. In other words, it can’t get its act together, so people who have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars are just going to have to wait.
It’s also demanding that all of Amazon.com’s .amazon applications (in English and otherwise) be killed. It wants Thai gone, too.
It did not release any further clarification on its boneheaded Beijing Communiqué, which effectively threw nearly a third of all applications into delay.
Given how I feel about the GAC’s “advice”, I can’t imagine if I had my own money invested in new TLDs.
It is amazing how arrogant Governments can be and seems that US Govt is as arrogant as the UK. In the UK the Registry is a Private non profit company owned by its many members , YET the UK government seeks to dictate how the Registry may operate and even give themselves a right to take over the company.
Wasn’t it a certain clique that invited government to intervene, primarily to protect the clique’s interests, having realized the majority where not very impressed with the way the clique were behaving?
All these applicants trying to get special treatment by lobbying the GAC are playing with fire. The IP interests are seeing this with the .amazon (now also in Chinese and Japanese wtf?), and the “community” applicants are going to have the GAC breathing down their necks for the rest of their existence. Of course, so will everyone else. Sigh.
FWIW, this one is not nearly as weird as the original zaniness of their communiqué after the Beijing meeting.
Yeah, the Chinese one is a true head scratcher.
It’s just like 1995 again, meaning the way it was ran at the beginning : One domain per entity, $200, you might even have to have a phone interview to get your domain. I did all that back then.
Oh, you also got 60 days to pay a domain you regged already, but if you were late by even one minute someone else could reg your domain, whether unpaid reg or unpaid renewal. The cut-off date was the day you lose your domain.
The only difference here is now you just have so many more moving parts : companies, extensions, money, etc….
Governments…
🙂