ICANN has officially rejected appeals to review its decision on the new contractual terms for the PiR registry, which manages the gTLD .ORG. Earlier such requests for reconsideration were submitted by the NameCheap domain registrar and the Electronic Frontier Foundation rights defender. They related to two major changes in the contract. NameCheap objected to lifting price caps for registration in .ORG. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was upset with the replacement of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) in .ORG with the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) mechanism.
Requests for reconsideration are usually reviewed by a special committee of the ICANN Board of Directors. However, in this case it was decided to use the services of third party lawyers, because three of the four committee members recused themselves due to the possibility of perception of conflicts of interest. As a result, the lawyers did not find any violations in ICANN’s decision, and the requests were thrown out. It is noteworthy that the board’s full discussion of both requests was webcast live by ICANN. According to Domain Incite, this was an unprecedented move.
During the board meeting, participants also discussed one of the most sensitive issues related to the review of the contract on managing .ORG. The draft new rules went out for public discussion on the ICANN website and collected several thousand comments, mostly negative. After the contractual change, the corporation is now suspected of ignoring the opinions of the members of the domain community. Members of the board and ICANN lawyers refuted these accusations, saying that they reviewed and evaluated all points of view. However, it seems that they did not look at each individual comment, but rather grouped them together based on similarity. As member of the board Avri Doria noted, “Whether one listens to the content once or listens to it 3,000 times, they have understood the same content.”
