Intellectual Property Law

ICANN Tuesday

By Susan Crawford

It’s already Wednesday morning here — 10.5 hour difference with DC/NY/Connecticut.

Tuesday was Constituency Day.  I spent the morning with the gTLD registries, the afternoon with the Board and the Government Advisory Committee, and the evening with everybody at the gala dinner put on by our hosts.

There are so many imponderables at this meeting.  There is discussion about a post-MoU (most recent version is called the “Joint Project Agreement”) ICANN, as that agreement will expire unless renewed in September 2009. That agreement runs between ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce, and is the source of ICANN’s contractual authority to make agreements with domain name registries and registrars.

There is discussion about non-ASCII versions of ccTLDs.  But the reason we call these things “ccTLDs” is that they are “country codes” based on the ISO 3166-1 list.  What is the principle behind expanding beyond this list yet calling these things ccTLDs (which implies a different relationship with ICANN than the generic TLDs have)?  And how would a “fast track” for issuing these new things work?

And there’s discussion about new gTLDs, and I am always interested in making sure ICANN is facilitating the entry of new domains - but several of the recommendations for policy choices to be made in issuing them seem to me, personally, to be unworkable.  What’s the principled basis on which ICANN can draw international lines based on morality/sedition/community boundaries?

Sorry for all the acronyms - I would do more explaining, but the connectivity here is not enough to allow for finding other sites to link to in this post.

I can report that the food is wonderful.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on February 12, 2008 (boomark / email).