According to the Internet Commerce Association (the ICA), the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) proposal, will NOT be included in the third version of the Draft Applicant Guidebook for new gTLDs to be released by ICANN in the first week of October.

According to the ICA the disclosure came in the testimony of ICANN’s COO Doug Brent, at a hearing on “The Expansion of Top level Domains and Its Effect on Competition” held last week by the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy.

In its posting on its site, the ICA states:

While some of the IRT recommendations will appear in the next GuideBook, such as:  “the “thick” Whois information proposal (the requirement that a registry maintain and offer Whois information in a centralized way), and a dispute mechanism for use after a registry has been created” the URS will not be.

Even if you have no interest in the new gTLD’s, this decision is very important to domain holders, as ICANN already stated the URS proposal was going to apply to current domain names including .com’s

If you are not familiar with the URS proposal, you should check out some of our other posts on this important issue, here, and here.

Of course the URS could come back at us at some point in a later GuideBook or as a separate proposal.

This is just another example of why I continue to be a strong supporter of the ICA and urge all domain holder to at least spend a few hundred bucks and become a member.

Once again the ICA is the only organization lobbying on behalf of domain owners.

Let me remind you that  trademark holders that didn’t think the URS was strong enough.

The ICA was also instrumental in defeating the Snowe Bill a proposed law that would criminalized domain ownership.

The other interesting development coming out of last week as noted by the ICA,  is that ICANN and the US Government have come to an agreement in which the US will give up some control over ICANN to the “World Internet Community”.

We predicted this would happen in our post of our predictions for 2009.

The ICA states on its site:

“”” The Economist reported, that a new agreement of unlimited duration will be announced in which the U.S. cedes some of its authority over ICANN to the “Internet community”. Indeed, we have just received an invitation to an ICANN graduation party to be held on October 1st at the Altitude Ballroom/Rooftop Terrace of the posh new W Hotel in downtown Washington “to recognize the conclusion of the Joint Project Agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce and to acknowledge ICANN’s continuing responsibilities to Internet users globally”. We shall wait to read the reportedly 4-page “Affirmation of Commitments” (let’s dub it the AOC, since everything ICANN requires its own acronym) but we suspect its wording will allow ICANN to argue to foreign regimes that it has been set free from U.S. control, while telling Congress that the U.S. retains a special and timeless relationship. Unfortunately, the greater oversight role that it reportedly carves out for foreign governments will likely translate into ICANN’s ostensible private sector leadership yielding some ground to multinational politics.””””

You should check out the full post of the ICA on their site, as there is a lot of important information.

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