United Nations, ITU, IMF, NATO and others ask for special protection in new gTLDs

The United Nations, ITU, IMF, NATO, OECD and 23 other international organizations have requested special protection in next year's expansion of the Internet.

In a letter send to the organization overseeing the expansion, ICANN, the lawyers of the international organizations, which also include the World Health Organization (WHO), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and World Trade Organization (WTO), argue that special exemption rules agreed to earlier this year for the Red Cross and Olympic Committee should be extended to them.

They propose that their names and related acronyms be subject to a "targeted exclusion of third party registrations" at both the top and second-level of the domain name system i.e. neither www.nato.example or www.example.nato would be allowed.

As to why they should be granted special privileges online, the authors claim that the new expansion of potentially thousands of new top-level domains will "impose a serious enforcement burden" due to abusive registrations and as a result they will have to "divert their public resources".

The letter quotes the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, Article 16 of the Trademark Law Treaty, Article 2 of the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and the “GAC Principles" over new gTLDs to back up their argument. However the broad point is that since each organization was created under an international treaty it should be provided with "the same treatment" as the Red Cross and Olympic Committee.

What the letter doesn't say

Thanks to a well-timed leak to Reuters - which took a cybersquatting angle in its story - as well as a highly charged political environment surrounding the program, the letter has been misreported as the international organizations disapproving of the program itself or even requesting its delay.

The situation has not been helped by the fact that the letter has not been published until now -- we make it available here to all .Nxt members.

In fact the letter makes no mention of the merits of the program itself and seeks only special protection rights for the signatories. It acknowledges the 12 January launch date and ask that the protections it wants be in place before then.

Why they won't get their protections

For those that have followed the debate over protections - and several signatories have also been closely involved - the request for special protections seems strange, even obtuse.

The Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) of ICANN - to which all the organizations are eligible to become members, and several are - reached a consensus view that the Red Cross and Olympic Committee met "very tightly drawn criteria" and noted that it was "unaware of any other international non‐profit organization that enjoys the level of special legislative protection across the world afforded to the IOC and the Red Cross".

Both organizations are specifically noted in international treaties and in many countries' domestic laws as holding a special status. It was on this understanding that the GAC and ICANN Board reached an agreement. The subsequent claim that because an organization was created through a treaty that is should be treated the same is a little disingenuous on the IGOs' part.

In seeking a longer term solution, ICANN's Board decided (see section 1c) that the GAC and ICANN's main policy body, the GNSO, should work on developing a long-term policy. And in the meantime it would ensure that neither of the names would be registered as new Internet extensions. A month later, ICANN's Kurt Pritz reiterated [pdf] that how that policy process will work is up to the GNSO and GAC themselves.

ICANN did however reject the suggestion that protection be extended to the second-level, noting, "the extraordinary step of blocking the requested names at the second level should not be taken as it would deny those with a legitimate interest or rights in registering those names at the second level, e.g., olympic.taxis and redcross.salt."

In that sense, it is hard to see why the legal heads of so many organizations signed up to a letter than they know has no chance of being agreed to either by its own representative body or the ICANN Board.

Why it doesn't matter anyway

What the letter also doesn't reflect is the fact that the signatories have multiple methods to prevent registration of their names at both the top and second level.

As members of the GAC, they are entitled to use the special warning system that was carved out for governments during the last phase of negotiations over the new gTLD program.

Then there is the "independent objector" who will be specifically keeping a look-out for misuse of international organization's names and will object on their behalf. And then there are the mechanisms available to everyone else to object to a given application, as well as a range of new mechanisms designed to prevent widespread abuse at the second level with new extensions.

In short, there is no chance that a top-level application containing an international organization's name or acronym is going to make it through the application process. Knowing that, someone would have to be extremely foolish to attempt to apply when it can only cost them tens of thousands of dollars for no gain.

So why any letter at all?

Some may see nefarious motives behind the letter. After all, Assistant Commerce Secretary Larry Strickling was warning only last week that efforts to delay the process were playing into the hands of governments that wished to pull governance of the Internet under the United Nations.

We suspect however that it is simply the case of too many lawyers getting together and deciding they are right. It's not a new phenomenon.