A communiqué released by the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee was one of the major events of the final day of ICANN 49 in Singapore. As expected, the GAC was unable to avoid the most disputable issue, the new gTLDs .wine and .vin.
Currently, there are three applications for the domain .wine and one for .vin (Donuts has applied for both). However, representatives of some European countries – France, in particular – and the EU in the GAC, are against delegating the strings until there is a procedure to safeguard the protection of geographical appellations of wines. Currently, registrars are allowed to block registration of only those domain names that use brand names protected by copyright. However, those do not include names of wine producing regions. Therefore, anyone can use the new gTLDs to register domains such as bordeaux.vin or champagne.wine.
There have been objections to this from members of the GAC representing some European countries. Their non-European colleagues, such as the United States, Australia and New Zealand, did not support them. Since the GAC could not come to an agreement, on March 22 ICANN gave the green light to further consideration of applications for the .wine and .vin domains. This decision provoked heated debates in the Governmental Advisory Committee during the conference in Singapore.
According to eyewitnesses, the debates were more than heated. An exasperated GAC member left the meeting early and told journalists that he would give anything to swap places with anyone. The committee failed to reach a decision on the issue. The GAC, however, seems to have found an official reason to suspend the wine-related applications.
The March 22 decision of ICANN was made based on expert opinion. French professor of law Jerome Passa was among the experts. It seems Passa’s opinion was not provided to the GAC, which is a violation of procedure, as stated in the GAC communiqué passed in Singapore. Therefore the GAC is requesting that ICANN cancel the decision.
GAC European members are said to be using the delay to negotiate the issue not with representatives of the US, Australia and New Zealand, but with the applicants themselves, in order for the new gTLD websites to receive guarantees of protection for geographical indicators.
