Page History

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At the Buenos Aires ICANN meeting, two members of the Business Community acting in their individual capacity – Ron Andruff and Marilyn Cade – met with Olivier Crepin-Leblond, Alan Greenberg and Evan Leibovitch from ALAC regarding an issue of mutual interest: the advancement of Policy Advisory Boards (PABs) developed by BC members as a way to address what are perceived to be substantial public-interest deficiencies in the new gTLD expansion program.  Such concerns have been raised by the ALAC as well as the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) in previous communications. 

On January 27 2014, the five individuals listed above sent a letter to the ICANN New gTLD Program Committee requesting it hold a Public Comment Period regarding the use of PABs to address these concerns. Responses dated February 4 from ICANN staff and subsequently February 20 from the ICANN Board have rejected this proposal, prompting the ALAC to consider holding its own Public Comment Process.

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While it is agreed amongst the proposed proposers that ICANN itself is not – and should not be – involved in the regulation of content of domains within these new TLDs, the original design of the program did not allow for any special external oversight over TLDs related to regulated industries or otherwise using trust-sensitive strings. In response to requests from its GAC and other stakeholders (but without consulting them on the response), ICANN instituted a mechanism called Public Interest Commitments (PICs). While the PIC program superficially provided a mechanism that enabled TLD applicants to demonstrate a set of self-imposed rules intended to satisfy the GAC advice, upon further review PICs are revealed to provide little or no actual public interest benefit:

• They can include wording that allows the TLD applicant/registry to arbitrarily change or even revoke all of its PICs. At any time, once a registry's PIC become a source of bother it has the option to change or even revoke its PICs at whim. Here is an example of one applicant's PIC, (note the text after clause 4.4) which has met no opposition from within ICANN's processes.
  

• Even for PICs that are allowed to remain in force, complaints that they have been breached can only be made by parties that can demonstrate direct harm as a result. (That eliminates governments, consumer groups, whistleblowers, news media or other third parties). Reporting an abrogated PIC requires a lengthy, expensive, adversarial process that appears biased against the complainant, subcontracted by ICANN to a Dispute Resolution Provider with no required grounding in the specifics of the relevant trust, regulatory or other special circumstances related to the string. In current proceedings, subcontracted dispute resolution processes have ruled against the At-Large Community, challenging even its ability to speak as a recognized community during its objections to certain high-trust TLD applications.
  

• In the unlikely event that a PIC is now arbitrarily changed and a complaint against it succeeds, the remedies offered do not necessarily help the complainant. The TLD operator's contract may be revoked but there is no accommodation for financial redress or an obligation to revoke offending subdomains.

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From the document: Regulated Industry gTLD GAC Safeguards Implementation via a Policy Advisory Board Model,  24 September 2013, with some minor text added since.

Introduction:

This outline provides a mechanism by which the GAC safeguard advice for protecting the public interest can be implemented so that, as Internet users interact with domains at new “sensitive string” gTLDs associated with regulated industries and professions, they can be assured that the registrants are bona fide entities engaged in legitimate activities. The safeguards can be fully developed and implemented through the establishment of balanced and inclusive Policy Advisory Boards that can develop appropriate registrant eligibility criteria and registry policies -- that can then in turn be incorporated within enforceable Public Interest Commitments Specifications (PICS) for the registry.

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