In a letter sent by the Registrar Stakeholder Group to ICANN, today, the group has come out against making any additional changes to the Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPM) for trademark holders in the new gTLD’s.
The letter was sent by the Chair of the Registrar Stakeholder Group Matt Serlin who wrote in part:
“”We also understand various parties are advocating for the inclusion of additional Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPMs), in excess of what is currently in the Guidebook. We are extremely concerned about this development at such a late stage in the program.
The community spent years developing and building consensus for the current set of new RPMs for new gTLDs, and these will represent a significant increase to what currently exist in today’s gTLDs. Any effort to revisit the discussion of RPMs – particularly outside policy development processes meant to provide predictability to contracted parties should be done after the gTLD program (with its agreed-upon RPMs) has been implemented and the effectiveness of the new RPMs can be evaluated.
Additionally, we believe the additional RPMs circulated in Toronto represent a change to the policy and not the implementation of the TMCH. In our conversations with you, there was a clear distinction in your mind between the two and we would certainly agree with your assessment that policy and implementation be considered separately. The Policy Development Process exists to tackle community-wide issues by assembling a group of people from different stakeholder groups who can come together and work to resolve or lessen problems. Policy changes should not be pursued by a single interest group working directly with ICANN Staff. Doing so would in fact jeopardize, if not outright ignore, the significant implementation issues involved.
Based on the RPMs in the Guidebook, registrars and registry operators have created product and business plans around those mechanisms, and to change those at this late date would have a significant impact on those plans. Moving forward with a change to the RPMs could further negatively impact reliance on the ICANN policy development process.””
