Some thoughts on the new gtld next round of application/Our public comment/email 1

[farzaneh badii]

We are working on the public comment for the recommendations for next round of
new gtld applications. I thought I highlight some of the issues to stir a
conversation here, to help the policy committee and the pen-holders with
finalizing our comments. The report is 300 pages and my knowledge is truly
limited so I am gonna send these emails in bite size (more or less) perhaps they
can help with shaping our comment and being able to submit it:

I am going to discuss some of our high level principles that can be violated if
these recommendations are adopted. Please chime in.
Here is our public comment: 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SxCa4cn-NEiS_tea-jUP02DSG6IEzf_O4_MBPLUtxZs/edit

Trademark overreach:Brand Registries (.Man) (or trademarking the generics as
Konstantinos Komaitas coined the term)
At the moment our public comment draft says that Brand registries should not be
automatically allocated to brand owners.  brand registry is somehow vague and I
think could lead to trademark overreach. What if a brand corresponds to a
generic name? .SHARP? .MAN? I think we should emphasize upon two things when
opposing brands be given automatic allocation: 1. the inappropriate process of
2012 2. limit our claim to brands that are generic names.  Look at this report
on .Brand: 
https://dotbrandobservatory.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Feb-2017-websites-profiles.pdf
how many generic names do you see?
I think instead of asking that corporations applications for .example be
limited, we should ask that generic names that happen to be brands should be
open registries. so that someone can register: bat.man. Spec 13, clause 9.13 has
a definition of .Brand which has to be revised.

The problem of trademarking generic terms  was clearly set out by one of our
then very active members in 2013 in this blog: 
http://www.circleid.com/posts/trademarking_generics_the_bank_fiasco/-ar


Also maybe we should think about other words. for example, international cartoon
characters. I don't have a problem with a corporation wanting to register the
name and have a registry operator but having it limited for its own purposes
sounds like trademark overreach to me.   I am in tears that I cannot register 
baqdadof.alibaba . But we can just compromise and just say generic names should
not be trademarked in domain name space.

I was not a part of NCSG even when these discussions were happening. So
enlighten me.
Closed Generics
closed generics are very bad ideas. They mean that registries can decide to
close down the registry to anyone but their corporation and brands. Google
abandoned the idea and then there was a ban imposed on closed generics. It can
lead to trade mark overreach. Are there any opinions on that?

Community TLDs
I don't know if we need to discuss this in the comment but Community TLDs in my
opinion especially when it comes to three letter words are bad ideas. Their
criteria of registration qualification are also not very global. But this
doesn't seem to be an issue at NCSG so I am just going to opress my desire to
ever register: ta.ngo




Farzaneh
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