Hi folks, On Wed, Sep 5, 2018 at 8:21 PM, Mitch Stoltz <mitch@eff.org> wrote:
Monetary "penalties" on registrants, and any recovery of costs beyond the arbitration itself, are beyond the scope of URS, UDRP, or indeed any ICANN policy. Those are matters for national courts. Aside from being a vast expansion of these dispute resolution policies, what Georges proposes is unworkable in practice. How would "penalties" and second- and third-order costs be collected from registrants? Would registrars have to sue their customers to collect these funds on behalf of trademark holders? Or would every registrant have to submit to potentially unbounded contractual liability to unknown third parties as a condition of registration?
Establishing a workable fee structure for URS (and UDRP) arbitrations is one thing. Expanding these policies to become systems for punishment of bad actors and broadly defined cost recovery is quite another—that's the domain of courts and trademark law, not ICANN policies.
Just to go back to Mitch's earlier post, there'd be some absurdity to ICANN prioritizing penalties for 2nd-level domain registrants, when top-level domains can be owned by companies who have plead guilty to criminal conduct: http://www.circleid.com/posts/20150520_should_barclays_lose_the_barclays_top... https://gtldresult.icann.org/applicationstatus/applicationdetails/1057 Let's properly rank things in order of importance, according to the severity of the crime involved. We'll spend millions of dollars in volunteer time pursuing petty crime prevention, yet do nothing when a guilty company such as Barclays owns an entire TLD? Where's Barclay's "penalty" from ICANN, or the reform to prevent bad actors like that financial institution from owning an entire TLD? Sincerely, George Kirikos 416-588-0269 http://www.leap.com/