Uniforum’s Pass questioned African Union’s move; critisized for misleading ICANN

African Union Commission blamed for breaking the rules to support its preferred applicant against transparent procedures Uniforum’s pass has come out as a controversial move based on the timing and announcements of the application status. Uniforum evaluation dubbed at 307 has waited until DotConnectAfrica’s evaluation of 1005 to announce a “pass” by ICANN and DCA …

Who Are the True Multi-Stakeholders in ICANN?

During ICANN Durban, I attended the Country Code Names Supporting Organisation (ccNSO) 10 year anniversary celebrations. ICANN Chairman, Dr Steve Crocker, was on hand to congratulate the ccNSO on their 10 years and revered them as the “true multi-stakeholders in ICANN”. Post Durban, I was reviewing notes and I came across a similar statement made …

Scam as ICANN Sponsors Members of Government (GAC)

Includes the African Batch! On 22 August 2013, the ICANN Board approved the FY14 Operating Plan and Budget.  The document describes the planned core operations and project activities, aligned with the required funding, for the 2014 fiscal year.  These funded project activities are based on ICANN’s strategic priorities as documented in the adopted three year …

ICANN Must Now Decide String Similarity Question

Yesterday, a decision on a string confusion objection was reached by a dispute resolution provider that resulted in a scenario that ICANN and the Applicant Guidebook had not addressed — conflicting opinions have been rendered by expert panelists ruling on the exact same pair of strings. One of our applications now hangs in the balance. …

The Great Internet Land Grab

It’s not easy to get a short, crisp Web address. In the twenty-eight years since the now-extinct computer maker Symbolics registered the first .com address, symbolics.com, the most economical and memorable Internet addresses have mostly been claimed. Even longer addresses, or domains, like a person’s full name, might not be available—or, more likely, there will …

Rwanda (.RW) Joins as Newest Member of the ccNSO

Rwanda Information Communication and Technology Association (RICTA), the ccTLD operator of .rw (Rwanda), is the newest ccNSO member. There are now 138 members of the ccNSO, Rwanda is located in Central Africa, east of Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are now 30 African country-code registry operators in the ccNSO membership. The Council of the …

ICANN Legal Rights Objections: What’s Past Is Prologue

As of today, panelists at the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Arbitration and Mediation Center have decided 12 trademark-based legal rights objections to a proposed top-level domain under the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ new gTLD initiative. They rejected every one, almost categorically so. With 53 legal rights objections remaining to be decided, the …