Showing posts with label lobbyist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lobbyist. Show all posts

2015-10-15

Why Did ICANN Become a Member of Trademark Lobbyist Group INTA?

"The International Trademark Association (INTA) is the global association of trademark owners and professionals ... INTA undertakes advocacy work throughout the world ..." -- from the INTA website

" . . . . you deny the existence of special interest lobbies in ICANN? Tell you what. Get yourself to an ICANN meeting, let me know if it is London, Los Angeles, or any other one, and I will give you a personal guided tour of special interest lobbies in ICANN. You’ll be shaking hands with so many lawyers and consultants you may want to bring some Chinese herbal lotion. If you want less dynamic and interesting evidence, take a look at this old blog post of ours, which documents ICANN staff’s catering to trademark/brand protection interests..." - Professor Milton Mueller (June 9, 2014)

Kudos to the esteemed Professor Milton Mueller of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) for his tweets below bringing our attention again to the gross lapses of judgment, and conflicts of interest at ICANN:
INTABulletin: The Voice of the International Trademark Association, July 15, 2015  Vol. 70 No. 13: Interview: Owen Smigelski, Director, ICANN Contractual Compliance: ".... It’s not always sufficient to see one comment from the IPC; it’s good to see comments from individual brand owners ... How else can INTA help? One recent development is that ICANN became an INTA member. I see that as a good opportunity for ICANN and the community to collaborate. I myself have been to three of the last four Annual Meetings. So there continues to be that relationship-building ... Another thing is that ongoing right now is a Rights Protection Mechanism (RPM) review. That’s looking at all the RPMs within ICANN, including the UDRP. There was a public comment period that ended in May and there will be a report later this year coming out, which will probably lead to additional policy and working group opportunities. I’m not sure what’s going to come out of that, but there could be modifications to the UDRP that INTA and its members should certainly be involved with. For more information on ICANN developments or to become involved with Internet and ICANN issues through INTA, contact INTA’s Senior Director of Internet Policy ..." (emphasis and IPC link added)

This boggles the mind! Trademark owners and lawyers, do you have a problem with ICANN? Why bother going through your lobbying organization, INTA, just go straight to one of INTA's outstanding new members: ICANN! Of course ICANN has a well-deserved reputation as being a "captured" organization of the well-resourced commercial organizations that dominate and control most ICANN groups, meetings, and processes, including its policy-making Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO). These "conflicts" had infected the ICANN Board of Directors to such a degree that in 2012, the U.S. Department of Commerce (NTIA) almost pulled the "IANA functions contract" completely away from ICANN:
"The Commerce Department said this month that while it was temporarily extending a contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to manage the allocation of computers’ Internet protocol addresses — and the .com and .net names of Web sites associated with them — it warned the organization that it needed to tighten its rules against conflicts of interest or risk losing a central role." --The New York Times, March 18, 2012 (emphasis added)
In February of this year, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade raised eyebrows at his speech at another lobbyist organization's meeting during ICANN 52, at Singapore:

Fadi Chehade: "... I think Adrian [Kinderis], Kurt [Pritz], and others who know this idea of the DNA Association [DNA represents the interests of the new gTLDs domain name industry] and started in some small meetings we were having at the ICANN office where I was a huge early supporter, and continued to be ... there's a brewing issue for example coming up that will affect your industry ... I'm committed to your industry without a question. I need to understand it more and spend more time in it, no question. I did realize at some point that ICANN itself is an organization needs a dedicated president that is focused on serving the industry. I asked Akram [Atallah] to abandon his COO role and be the president [of ICANN's Global Domains Division (GDD)]. We created this division to serve you. In many ways we need to pair GDD and DNA and make sure that that is very tight ..."--ICANN President and CEO Fadi Chehade, transcript of DNA meeting, February 10, 2015, video of meeting here (emphasis and links added).

Who at ICANN is serving the Public Interest? We now know that the ICANN Global Domains Division and its President, Akram Atallah, serve the new gTLDs' domain name industry and its lobbying arm, the DNA. And we also now know that ICANN is not just serving, but is a member of the trademark lobbying organization INTA. But is there ANYONE serving the PUBLIC INTEREST at ICANN? Does ICANN, its Board of Directors, or any of its officers, staff, or its "ICANN stakeholder community" even care about the Public Interest? Or is it only governments that care about, and protect, the public interest?

 ICANN, and the ICANN Community, just don't get it. It is obvious that the last thing ICANN needs in order to become accountable to the Global Internet Community (global multistakeholder community) is to become a "membership" organization primarily of, for, and by the lobbyists and lobbying organizations who already have an inordinate and corrupting influence over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

It appears ICANN has learned nothing since 2012, and may not be ready to operate without some kind of "governmental oversight" to protect the "global public interest." At a minimum, it appears ICANN officers and staff lack the moral compass to discern and avoid obvious conflicts of interest. Is this really the appropriate time for the US government to just walk away from its oversight role and leave the global multistakeholder community (global internet community) vulnerable to exploitation by ICANN and its special interest lobbyist stakeholders? It may be time for Larry Strickling (NTIA), the US Department of Commerce and the Obama Administration to reassess their IANA Stewardship Transition announcement of March, 2014.

See also on Domain Mondo:




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2015-09-24

China (CAICT) Objects to ICANN CCWG Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal

Fiduciary Duty: "Definition: A fiduciary duty is a legal duty to act solely in another party's interests. Parties owing this duty are called fiduciaries. The individuals to whom they owe a duty are called principals. Fiduciaries may not profit from their relationship with their principals unless they have the principals' express informed consent. They also have a duty to avoid any conflicts of interest between themselves and their principals or between their principals and the fiduciaries' other clients. A fiduciary duty is the strictest duty of care recognized by the US legal system. Examples of fiduciary relationships include those between a lawyer and her client, a guardian and her ward, and a director and her shareholders." -- Legal Information Institute (link above) (emphasis added)
UPDATE September 24, 2015: CCWG-Accountability "On the Way to LA" to hijack the Global DNS from the Global Multistakeholder Community through their deceptively named CMSM or "Community Mechanism as Sole Member" Model which allows select groups of ICANN "stakeholders" to override ICANN Board decisions and disregard the ICANN Board's fiduciary duties to the global multistakeholder community including the Board's fiduciary duty to act in the global public interest at all times.

"... At least the USG (US government) offers some accountability. ICANN's primary active stakeholders are businesses making money off the DNS; most users are too busy elsewhere to pay much attention..."--comment of Esther Dyson, ICANN's founding Chairman, in The Guardian, Sept 22, 2015

 "Sole Member given reserved power under Bylaws to override Board decision directly, regardless of Board fiduciary duties." - Legal counsel for CCWG-Accountability (pdf) opinion on CCWG 2nd draft

China's CAICT has joined others in objecting to the power grab by the "ICANN community stakeholders" a/k/a ICANN insiders to the exclusion of the "global Internet community" in the most recent CCWG-Accountability 2nd Draft Report (pdf) which proposed a Single or "Sole Member" Model (comprised by only select ICANN stakeholder groups) to be "on top" over the ICANN Board of Directors and control ICANN, said Sole Member having no accountability to the global Internet community nor fiduciary duty to act in the global public interest--in fact one leading member of the CCWG has responded to an ICANN Board Member on the CCWG mail list and noted that with the "Sole Member Model" the ICANN Board will no longer have to worry about breaching "fiduciary duties" (to the global multistakeholder community a/k/a global internet community, e.g., or to act in the global public interest)--
"Members don't owe fiduciary duties generally speaking, just as the organisations that would comprise the member (the SOs and ACs) don't today. The [ICANN] Board's members do. The existence of a membership system modifies those duties for Board members - they do not breach fiduciary duties in implementing a decision a member has made. This could be a rabbit hole but the point is that the member option has more flexibility in determining matters and does not create impossibilities for the Board where it does so. That's a design feature of the choice of membership." -- Jordan Carter, CCWG-Accountability member (emphasis added)
Rabbit hole? "Down the rabbit hole" - a metaphor for an entry into the unknown, the disorientating or the mentally deranging, from its use in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. source: Rabbit hole - Wikipedia

Meanwhile, China's CAICT has joined with others and objects to the CCWG's 2nd Draft Report--
"... We believe, in designing a voting system, the most important element that need to be considered is the representation of the global Internet community, instead of the representation of the ICANN community. Therefore, geographical balance should be an important element in terms of allocating the votes in the community; users' representation and the interests of developing countries should be properly considered too. For instance, Internet users in Asia exceed 1.4 billion, accounting for 45% of the world users. If there's no votes or extremely limited votes for Asian representatives, then this voting system is not appropriate..." -- Comment (pdf) submitted by China Academy of Information and Communication Technology (CAICT), September, 2015, Beijing, China, in response to CCWG-Accountability's 2nd Draft Report (emphasis added)

The above echoes other comments made, including the following submitted to the ICG mail list by Richard Hill on September 20, 2015:
Dear ICG,
A portion of the work of CCWG-Accountability is directly related to the transition proposal that you are coordinating. CWG-Accountability does not have, as far as I know, a public comments forum
such as the this one, and it does not accept comments from the general public, so I'm posting this message here and requesting that it be forwarded to CWG-Accountability. I refer to the draft summary of comments on the CWG-Accountability proposal published at: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/accountability-cross-community/attachments/20150915/8167a9d5/2nd-draft-CCWGtrends-v4-0001.pdf
I detail below my concerns.
1. Who are the stakeholders? [in other words, the Global Multistakeholder Community or just certain "ICANN stakeholders"?]
Slide 2 of the PDR referenced above presents a "Stakeholder Distribution of Comments Received". The identified categories of stakeholders are:
* Governments
* ccTLDs
* Advisors to the CCWG-Accountability
* Chartering Organizations
* CWG-Stewardship
* Technical Community
Does this imply that individuals and civil society organizations are not stakeholders? Does this imply that comments from individuals and civil society organizations were not considered?
2. Misleading statistics
Slides 8 ff. of the PDF present breakdowns of responses. For example, it is stated that 27 responses agreed that the CCWG-Accountability proposal enhances ICANN's accountability while 61 did not provide an answer. It may be correct that 61comments did not explicitly answer that question, but at least six responses did answer it negatively, albeit implicitly ... The statistics presented are misleading because they imply that "did not provide answer" implies support for the proposal, which is not necessarily the case ..."

Domain Mondo has previously noted the CCWG-Accountability publishing misleading representations of the public comments received to the 2nd Draft Report. The CCWG-Accountability is scheduled to meet with members of the ICANN Board this Friday and Saturday. Maybe the ICANN Board of Directors can at least do something about the CCWG leadership publishing "misleading statistics." The CCWG-Accountability is looking more and more like an "insider deal" favoring the vested self-interested special interests ("ICANN stakeholders" or "lobbyists") who have always wanted to totally control and financially benefit from ICANN policy-making, to the exclusion of "outsiders" (a/k/a global multistakeholder community or "global Internet community") and to the detriment of the "global public interest." With US (NTIA) stewardship in place, the lobbyists could never totally control ICANN--now is their chance.

See also on Domain Mondo:




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2015-07-09

Comments Overwhelmingly Oppose URS for CAT and PRO gTLDs

Comments closed 7 Jul 2015 23:59 UTC on:

  • Proposed Renewal of .CAT Sponsored TLD Registry Agreement--all comments are here. 
  • Proposed Renewal of .PRO Unsponsored Registry Agreement--all comments are here.

    • ICANN staff has only one supporter--Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC)--the trademark lobbyist (a/k/a stakeholder) organization within ICANN whose President, Trademark Attorney Greg Shatan, filed the lone comment "supporting" ICANN staff's attempt to apply new gTLDs' URS provisions in the renewal of incumbent gTLDs registry agreements. Even the ICANN Business Constituency (BC) filed an "opposition" comment, stating, in part:
    "... our concern is that a unilateral decision by ICANN contractual staff to take the new gTLD registry agreement as the starting point for renewal RAs for legacy gTLDs has the effect of transforming the PDDRP and the URS into de facto Consensus Policies without following the procedures laid out in ICANN’s Bylaws for their creation. The fact that these RPMs are present in all three proposed renewal RAs referenced in this letter reinforces that conclusion..." (emphasis added)
    In Domain Mondo's opinion, the unilateral actions taken by ICANN staff in recent months raise legitimate questions as to whether Intellectual Property stakeholders may be exercising undue influence over ICANN officers and staff--how else to explain: (1) ICANN staff's attempt to bypass policy-making procedures and bylaw requirements (see BC comment above) and apply the URS in three incumbent gTLD RAs--.TRAVEL, .CAT, .PRO--as well as (2) ICANN officers and staff's attempt to throw under the bus dotSUCKS Registry Operator Vox Populi without any finding of breach of the Registry Agreement or other wrongdoing, but just because the IPC sent ICANN one letter? Why didn't ICANN just respond by telling the IPC to file a complaint with the FTC or OCA? If the IPC (or any special interest stakeholder group within ICANN) says "jump," do ICANN officers and staff only ask "how high?" The entire world saw what the US Federal Trade Commission and Canada's OCA thought of the whole ICANN dotSUCKS fiasco.

    To be clear, this has nothing to do with the merits of the various positions taken by the IPC, some of which Domain Mondo happens to agree with, e.g., who is in favor of exorbitant or extortionate domain name registration pricing schemes? Certainly not domain name registrants! No, this is about integrity of process, transparency, accountability.

    Questions:
    1. Is this any way to run a global multi-stakeholder organization that claims it is ready to be "free of US government oversight"?
    2. Doesn't the global multi-stakeholder community deserve better performance from ICANN staff and officers than indicated above?
    The "ICANN Staff Report" is already way "overdue" on .TRAVEL with no explanation on the ICANN website. What are they waiting for? Who are they conferring with? Are ICANN Officers and staff plotting strategy with interested stakeholders? We have no way of knowing. This is ICANN transparency and accountability?

    In most organizations the rot starts at the top. "Accountability," is a word ICANN loves to preach, but rarely practices. And, unfortunately, the ICANN Board of Directors has allowed ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade to laden ICANN with his personal "cronies" in most top positions--a burden for the next ICANN CEO to deal with, along with ICANN's out-of-control spending, including lavish salaries and benefits. The ICANN Board needs to start holding ICANN staff and officers accountable by asking some direct questions of ICANN Global Domains Division President Akram Atallah. If the Board can't get straight answers and reasonable explanations by those in leadership positions, then perhaps the Board needs to start taking action by telling Akram Atallah (or others) to follow, or precede, "his buddy" Fadi Chehade "out the door." That's called real "accountability."

    For additional background, see on Domain Mondo:

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