[FONT=verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif]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.[/FONT]
Continue reading "The IRT black box"
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