Hi everyone,

I apologize for missing the call.  I wanted to follow up on this statement, which I’ve trimmed from Prof. Tushnet’s email, to reduce the message length.

>>>  My own takeaway from the research is that the URS is generally functioning well for easy cases, but there is a serious issue of lack of reasoning and thus lack of information in a significant subset of cases.  Following up on a question asked last time, Alex separated the cases by provider and found that examiners only copied and pasted in ADR Forum. All ADNDRC and MFSD cases had at least some explanation provided.

I hope that our STI/IRT members and maybe even staff, can pull more from their collective brains on this, but I here is my recollection of how the reasoning question went down (full disclosure:  I was with Forum at the time and substantially wrote their RFI to be a URS provider).

--STI created a “tapestry” of RPMs and created a “light/fast” URS that was for such straight-forward cases that the complaint and decision should just be tick-boxes.

--community outrage at exclusive use of tick boxes so,

--IRT said it must NOT be tick box-only.  The Examiner must have a chance to make remarks.  There was no community requirement that there be reasoning, merely the option.

--Indeed, in light of the anticipated low fees, it was anticipated that the Examiners would do a quick review and if the complainant didn’t quickly win on its face, they should have the option to go back and file a UDRP for a deeper look.

I request correction if I’m wrong, but, if I’m right, then we need to back up and determine:

1. What’s the harm in the level of reasoning in URS decisions currently (recall this is always our threshold question – what is broken)?

2. Would enforcing more “reasoning” solve the problem?

3. Is the WG prepared to re-assess the fees charged to parties if a more UDRP-level of work will be required?

I have no opinion on the answers to the questions, but just wanted to remind everyone that a pretty bright, diverse group actually spent a lot of time debating tick-box vs reasoning and ended up deciding reasoning should be optional, so we shouldn’t *assume* that “the more reasoning, the better.”

Best,

Kristine