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The New York Times and new gTLD roadshow

14 July 2009
By Kieren McCarthy

Updated: ICANN’s new gTLD team are on the road at the moment, spreading the word about the historic expansion of the Internet’s domain name space that we as an organization have been working on for four years or so.

Yesterday, they were in New York; tomorrow, they’ll be in London. Then Hong Kong on 24 July and Abu-Dhabi on 4 August (see here for more details). The idea is to spread the word as well as gather more input on the process. And the biggest bone of contention at the moment is the issue of how to deal with trademarks with a whole new raft of Internet extensions.

The New York meeting was visible online using our new conferencing software that we also used at the Sydney meeting, which includes video, audio, presentations, a chatroom and a Q&A box. And you can see a full archive of the meeting in links below.

What was most interesting out of the discussions (from my perspective anyway) was a blog post produced by the New York Times on the day. It is a pretty good summary of events and also helps put it in context. It’s useful to get the outside view when you spend too long in the ICANN bubble.

The post, Brokering Peace Between Brand Owners and Domainers, pretty much hits the nail on the head when it comes to a lot of ICANN’s work – particularly from the staff perspective, where a huge amount of the work is trying to find a solution that people with strong and opposing views can live with.

Anyway, an interesting piece, have a read when you have a second.

The video archive of the New York meeting is available in four parts:

Part I: Run through of the Trademark Protection report produced by the Implementation Recommendation Team
Part II: Reports from WIPO and eNom on the trademark issue
Part III: Public feedback and questions from the floor
Part IV: Malicious conduct panel discussion


And the archive for the London meeting is also in four parts:

Part I: Intro and summary of the IRT report on trademark protection
Part II: WIPO recommendations on trademark protections; eNom reflections on IRT report. Other reflections on IRT report and other suggestions for solutions to trademark issue. Some questions from the floor
Part III: Public feedback and questions from the floor
Part IV: Malicious conduct panel discussion


Authors

Kieren McCarthy