It’s safe to say that with just a week to go before ICANN intended to sign the first contract for a new gTLD, the last thing anyone wanted was a 12-page document from the world’s governments with 16 new “safeguards”, six of which it wants to see applied to every new extension.
But what the industry shouldn’t overlook, especially in the face of the expected critical responses this week and next, is that the Governmental Advisory Committee’s (GAC’s) formal advice from the ICANN Beijing meeting represents an opportunity for the domain name industry to lock-in self-regulation at a critical point in its evolution.
IFFOR has been focused for some time on the question of what registries will need to do in a world where domain names can end in any word. As such, we see the GAC advice as a simple reflection of genuine, and understandable, concerns from a body whose main job is to identify public policy issues. more