The IRT black box

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Thursday, March 26. 2009

The noise that I'm hearing about the IRT – the Implementation Recommendation Team that the ICANN Board at its Mexico meeting requested be set up to give trademark holders sufficient protection as new gTLDs are introduced – has me slightly worried.

Despite some strong, and I think well-founded, recommendations to the contrary, it seems the IRT has decided to work behind closed doors. No publication of the meeting transcripts or recordings, no open mailing list so that anyone in the community can follow its discussions (like they can for, say, the GNSO Council, whose mailing list is public). This, I'm told, so that IRT members can have "open and frank" discussions.

I do understand the principle. On such sensitive topics, you can sometimes expect more productive results if you allow behind-closed-doors deliberations so that people don't feel like Big Brother is watching them every time they open their mouth. Yet I can't help but think that keeping the rest of us in the dark about what's going on in the IRT is a missed opportunity to show that real thought is going into debugging the potentially explosive IP issue.

Aside from this, the composition of the IRT is also somewhat vexing to me. I'm told there will be around 15 IP lawyers, plus a registrar and a registry representative. I suppose there's logic in having such a large proportion of lawyers on this kind of a panel, but I'm still curious to see who those lawyers are. In other words, are we dealing with the usual ICANN suspects or will there be fresh blood there to get new ideas rolling? And why not have greater representation from different parts of the community?

An official announcement on the IRT and the way it's going to work is expected sometime this week. Perhaps some of these questions will be answered then…

Posted by Stephane Van Gelder in ICANN at 11:31 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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