I concur with what Alan said. While I was disheartened by the second-class-citizen status afforded ALAC at these meetings, our presence here was greater than it was within the IRT or STI efforts. I like to think that, together with the NCSG, we (again) fended off the worst excesses requested by the rights holders. However, as Alan said, we are sympathetic to the desire to reduce cybersquatting, frivolous and defensive registrations, and end-user confusion/misdirection. On 17 November 2012 00:10, Alan Greenberg <alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca> wrote:
Copy of a message sent to ALAC list ===================================
As you are aware, a meeting was held in Brussels several weeks ago to discuss implementation issues for the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH). The meeting included representatives of the GNSO Stakeholder Groups and Constituencies, but not At-Large. On Thursday and Friday of this week, a follow-on meeting was held in Los Angeles. In addition to a discussion of many of the technical issues related to the TMCH, a full day was spend discussing a list of issues that had been presented to ICANN by the GNSO Business and Intellectual Property Constituencies (http://www.icann.org/en/news/correspondence/ncsg-to-icann-01nov12-en.pdf ). This time At-Large was represented (unfortunately only remotely as no travel funding was provided). I had the honour of participating along with Evan.
The first day on the BC/IPC issues was both interesting and productive. The intent was:
1. To fully understand what it was that the BC and IPC were asking for. The original document was not particularly clear, and in fact, the BC/IPC have spent the weeks following Toronto fleshing out their ideas.
2. To understand whether these issues were in fact just implementation (as the BC/IPC) believed, or Policy, which should be addressed by GNSO Policy processes. The issue has been much discussed within ICANN, but the difference has never been formally addressed before. Staff were charged with starting to develop a methodology for making such decisions in the future. Although the work is still preliminary, it was used to analyze the more controversial of the BC/IPC proposals, and the outcome matched that of the discussions within ALAC. They were all deemed to be Policy and thus required GNSO action to formally change the status quo (a relief to some at the table, and troubling to others).
3. To brainstorm the issues raised by the BC/IPC and see if any solutions could be found to address the issues that concerned them which at the same time might be acceptable to the other stakeholders. After a rather harrowing day (12 solid hours, followed by another 2 hours on Friday) the result was a strawman proposal. The proposal completely pleased none of the people involved, which some people say is a good measure of a reasonable compromise. Regardless, it is a good start for more traditional community-based discussions which now have to happen.
ALAC's first position was that we would prefer to not have new policy changes in the new TLD program at this late date. However we also did look at the individual issues as discussed in a message I sent earlier this week. The resultant strawman proposal actually fits in moderately well with the positions that ALAC took. Of course, this is not yet a formal policy and there are many details to be developed. This is perhaps not surprising, as many of the ALAC positions to protect innocent Internet users coincide well with TM holders desire to prevent cyber-squatting and fraud, and the over-reaching that some attribute to TM holders (that is, wanting protections far an above those granted by the TM itself) were to some extent held in control.
I have to note that this type of focus group is not an unknown way to try to bridge widely disparate positions, but it is a very uncommon one in ICANN, and one that some people have said violates the bottom up multi-stakeholder model of ICANN. It does bear some similarity to the STI group which many herald as one of the more effective ICANN policy efforts. It also re-opened issues that the community (well, part of the community including At-Large) had thought or hoped were closed issues. Whether it was an effective move or not history will tell. One of the measures that I have is how quickly we can convene a more formal ICANN process to refine and actually approve a policy coming out of this proposal.
After Toronto, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé had said that he considers the TMCH to be a critical issue and would personally oversee its implementation. True to his word, he personally ran the 14 hours of meetings. It was interesting!
I will elaborate (as perhaps will Evan) more in the coming days on some of the high and low points of the meeting, but this will have to do for the moment. Today I was on the call for over 8 hours, and yesterday including a GNSO meeting starting at 6 am and one other WG, I totaled 15 hours of teleconferences. So it is perhaps time for a bit of rest and relaxation.
You can find the initial description of outcomes of the meeting at http://blog.icann.org/2012/11/trademark-clearinghouse-update/.
Alan
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