Dear Councillors,

Ahead of the official Council minutes, the following resolution was passed at the Council meeting on 15 July 2010.

 Mary Wong proposed an amendment to the motion  on the  New gTLD Recommendation (as amended 15 July 2010) that was made by Edmon Chung and seconded by  Rafik Dammak; Edmon and Rafik accepted the amendment as friendly.

Note: The original motion was discussed in the Council meeting on 20 May and deferred to 10 June. In making the amended motion, Edmon submitted a redline version to the Council list on 2 June 2010

(http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/council/msg08962.html) and Rafik accepted the amendment as friendly on 4 June 2010

(http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/council/msg09000.html)

WHEREAS:

· The Draft Applicant Guidebook, Version 4 does not include an Extended Review option for strings that fail the initial evaluation for confusing similarity and likelihood to confuse;

· The GNSO Council recognizes that time is of the essence in sending feedback to ICANN staff on the Draft Applicant Guidebook;

· The IDNG Drafting Team established by the GNSO Council has discussed various circumstances where applicants for strings that may be designated as confusingly similar in the initial evaluation may be able to present a case showing that the string is not detrimentally similar to another string;

· The GNSO Council in Recommendation #2 on the GNSO Final Report on the Introduction of New gTLDs in September 2007 intended to prevent confusing and detrimental similarity and not similarity that could serve the users of the Internet;

· A Twenty-one day public comment period was held, comments were received and considered by the Council;

RESOLVED:

· The GNSO Council takes action in its meeting of 15 July 2010 to send the letter.

PROPOSED LETTER:

To: Kurt Pritz and members of the ICANN New GTLD Implementation Team,

CC: ICANN Board

The GNSO Council requests a change to Module 2 of the Draft Applicant Guidebook. Specifically, we request that the section on "Outcomes of the String Similarity Review" be amended to allow applicants to request an Extended Review under applicable terms similar to those provided for other issues such as "DNS Stability: String Review Procedure". We further request that a section be added on ³String Similarity - Extended Review² that parallels other such sections in Module 2.

This request is seen as urgent because there are conditions under which it may be justified for applicants for a string which has been denied further processing based on confusing similarity by the Initial Evaluation to request an extended evaluation. This Extended Review would evaluate extenuating circumstances in the application which may be such that the similarity is not actually detrimental. This may occur, inter alia, in cases such as:

· The same Registry Operator (for an existing gTLD or a proposed new gTLD) could apply for a string that is similar to an existing or applied for string in a manner that is not detrimentally similar from a user point of view. For example, it is possible that an applicant could apply for both a gTLD with a conventional ASCII label and a corresponding internationalized gTLD (IDN gTLD) that could be deemed to be similar but not cause the detrimental confusion that the GNSO recommendation was trying to avoid.

· A situation where there is an agreement between a new applicant Registry Operator and the Registry Operator of an existing gTLD that allows for better service for the users in the geographical area where the new gTLD will be offered. For example, MuseDoma, the Registry Operator for .museum could enter into an agreement with a new gTLD applicant to offer an IDN version of .museum for a specific language community. The two strings might be judged to be similar but their delegation would not cause detrimental confusion.

We thank you for your prompt attention to this GNSO Council request.

The motion carried unanimously in the Contracted Parties House and the motion carried in Non Contracted Parties House with one abstention.

Jaime Wagner(ISPCP) abstained providing the following reason:

Because there were strong discussions in the ISPCP and though I am in favour, there is some concern about the motion and it is better for me to abstain than express my personal views.

Thank you.

Kind regards,

Glen

Glen de Saint Géry

GNSO Secretariat

gnso.secretariat@gnso.icann.org

http://gnso.icann.org