Following ICANN’s 50th conference in London, the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) issued a communiqué that includes formal advice to the ICANN Board to protect permanently the terms and names associated with the Red Cross and Red Crescent in all the national languages in top- and second-level domains.
It is certainly a noble goal, yet the GAC’s recommendation raises several issues. First, the GAC is enforcing a solution which no one seems to be against. Next, such solutions cannot be approved without involving the rest of the ICANN community, specifically the multi-stakeholder Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), which the GAC should know. Furthermore, the GAC’s recommendation is addressed to the ICANN Board and does not mention the GNSO’s stand on this issue or even the organization itself.
This sounds like the GAC is telling ICANN to disregard the principle of multistakeholderism, even though its representatives spent much of the ICANN 50 expressing support for the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance.
The GAC’s approach is doubly baffling, because humanitarian and international non-governmental organizations already enjoy protection, even if temporary, in ICANN’s New gTLD program, and the GNSO has recently voted to make these protections permanent.
When asked what the GAC wants to achieve, UK GAC member Mark Carvell said: “I’m talking about our advice with regard to protection of national entities at the second level. So, for example, British Red Cross dot whatever. That protection does not exist, and is not agreed as we understand it.”
This may be so, but the list of Red Cross and Red Crescent strings for which the GAC demanded protection was most recently updated last September and does not include strings such as “britishredcross” or “americanredcross” or any other strings that can be associated with national Red Cross branches.
In other words, the GAC is changing the rules on the go and without notifying other members of the Internet community, which is hardly in line with the principle of multistakeholderism.
