Thank you for the kind comment. This is certainly an important issue, but your analysis of the work to date is not quite accurate, as there has been both the admission that such problems could exist, and that they will need to be dealt with. Sanctions for "abuse" of the URS (and let's be pragmatic, abuse is likely to be judged differently depending on who the beholder is) have yet to be discussed in the STI group (we have had only one meeting dedicated to the URS). However, both the IRT report and the staff proposal sets what I presume will be the base level of sanction: three occasions where complaints are abusive will bar the complainant from filing a URS for 1 year (abusive not yet defined). NCSG has defined a set of sanctions which I am guessing will deemed to be too high by the group as a whole. Presumably the final outcome, if there is one, will be in the middle. Alan At 08/11/2009 01:26 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
Greetings from Las Vegas, my first non-conference, non-family travel in years (current gambling tally: -$91 after two days)
Alan and Olivier have done a fantastic job in assembling together a compendium of diverse views while still tracking the work being done on this issue within the NCUC and GNSO's STI working group.
The only deficiency I see is beyond the bounds of the specific issues raised by the Board, because (IMO) the Board has been listening to the IPC and US government and is seeing the issues within those groups' frames of reference.
What I mean to say is... there seems to be an asssumption that all the brand owners are working in good faith and (at least most of) the targets of their UDRP/URS actions are working in bad faith. But what protections exist to prevent abuse? How do we protect legitimate brand protection interests while protecting harrassment good-faith use that brand owners don't want? (ie, "this-brand-sucks.tld") Such good-faith registrants are usually low in the resources needed, and brand owners can use the processes to hound them into submission. This is of significant concern to me as we move to opening up new TLDs.
The NCUC has been addressing this internally, but such issues have not appeared to make their way into the thought process of the Board (or the STI) in dealing with this issue.
Is this considered a significant issue within At-Large? How do we best (re-)introduce this issue, which goes beyond the Board's charge to GNSO?
- Evan