2. GAC Communiqué - GAC Advice (Alice Munyua)

GAC advice on new gTLDs contained in the GAC Beijing communiqué

GAC advice represents a consensus position among member states that a particular new gTLD application potentially raises sensitivities, thereby creating strong presumptions that the ICANN Board of Directors should not approve the application.

The Beijing meeting Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) communiqué issued on 11 April 2013 was an important one, as ICANN was expecting GAC Advice on new gTLDs, as defined in the Applicant Guidebook. The GAC communiqué serves as the official notification to applicants of GAC Advice and triggers a 21-day response period as per the Applicant Guidebook (Module 3.1).

The guidebook states: "If the Board receives GAC Advice on new gTLDs stating that it is the consensus of the GAC that a particular application should not proceed, this will create a strong presumption for the ICANN Board that the application should not be approved. If the Board does not act in accordance with this type of advice, it must provide its rationale for not doing so."
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3. Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) - an update (Ed Pascoe)

Here are some of the highlights of the meetings and discussions around the TMCH at ICANN Beijing.

The pricing for the trademark holders and the ability to pay for the trademarks have been finalised. Everything else is still under development or in discussion. All the TMCH meetings were very well attended and fairly vocal. They have received lots of feedback and objections to some of the proposals so expect some of them to change.

In particular IBM are still implementing email notifications of status changes. The SMD has yet to be implemented. The full strawman process is yet to be implemented. The text for rights holders’ notice of domain name registration has yet to be discussed.

The TMCH will verify trademarks automatically where they have direct access to a trademark database. Otherwise the rights holder will have to submit trademark documentation.

TLD is required to give 30 days’ advance notice of sunrise.

It is expected that the first TLD to use the TMCH for sunrise will be .jobs.  .jobs was delegated in 2005 but has recently changed its charter and has never had a sunrise period.  TMCH are predicting a very short testing phase before it goes live.

Some of the changes that have happened to the TMCH in the past few weeks include the following:

- The claims notice period has changed from 60 days to 90 days.

- The TMCH will provide brand holders with 30 days’ notice prior to the start of any sunrise period. This means that no TLD can start its sunrise without giving prior notice to the TMCH. If the TMCH does not have the resources/bandwidth to process the sunrise period, the TLD will have to delay sunrise until capacity is available.

- Brandholders will be able to register up to 50 variants of their marks in the TMCH as long as those variants have been the subject of successful litigation or UDP arbitration in the past.
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AFRICAN INTERNET COLLABORATION RECEIVES BOOST WITH "BEIJING AGREEMENT"



A landmark Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been signed between the ZA Central Registry (ZACR) and the African Top Level Domains Organisation (AfTLD) at ICANN's 46th Public Meeting in Beijing, People's Republic of China.

Dubbed the "Beijing Agreement", the MoU is the foundation of the relationship between AfTLD - the representative of African country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) managers - and ZACR - the registry that is set to be awarded the right to operate the new dotAfrica (.africa) registry by ICANN.

The agreement is a culmination of collaboration in existence since 2011 when AfTLD and its members endorsed the ZACR dotAfrica application. The agreement was signed by AfTLD President Dr Paulos Nyirenda, ZACR CEO Neil Dundas and the dotAfrica Steering Committee Chair Mohammed El Bashir. The key deliverable from the MOU is the allocation of a portion of dotAfrica’s surplus revenue for programmes aimed at enhancing African ccTLD capacity as administered by AfTLD.

The AfTLD capacity building programme includes technical, policy and regulatory training, workshops and conferences. The investment in AfTLD’s ccTLD programme is not the only key deliverable for the ZACR dotAfrica project. Other key deliverables are African registrar development, African content development and ancillary socio-economic objectives.
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