TMCH Individual Proposal #6

The Trademark Clearinghouse database provider(s) should be contractually bound to maintain, at minimum, industry-standard levels of redundancy and uptime. 


To further ensure the effective delivery of the Sunrise and Trademark Claims services, the following implementation guidance should be provided to the Implementation Review Team that will be formed to advise ICANN org on implementation of those policy recommendations that are ultimately approved by the GNSO Council and the ICANN Board:

  • Consider the advisability of requiring that more than one provider be appointed; and
  • Review the work of the Implementation Advisory Group that was formed for the 2012 New gTLD Program[1] to assist ICANN org with developing the specifications for and design of the Trademark Clearinghouse.


Context: 

Rationale provided by the Proponent: 

It is critical that the Trademark Clearinghouse database remains available for access by registries and registrars in order to provide the mandatory Sunrise and Trademark Claims services and, in some cases, additional services such as extended claims periods. 


Working Group Deliberation: This proposal concerns the operation of the Trademark Clearinghouse Database (currently administered by IBM). Where Deloitte operates the Trademark Clearinghouse validation service that checks trademarks submitted for entry into the TMCH against the substantive and other criteria set out in the TMCH Guidelines, IBM operates the resulting TMCH Database with which registry operators and registrars interact, e.g. to offer the Trademark Claims service. In this context, some Working Group members expressed concerns about operational considerations due to there being only a single provider (e.g., one Working Group member noted that several Registry Operators had experienced downtime issues when accessing the TMCH Database). However, the Working Group did not develop a specific recommendation to address this issue.


[1] See details here: https://neWorking Grouptlds.icann.org/en/about/trademark-clearinghouse/summary-iag-input-26sep12-en.pdf