On March 30, NCUC Executive Committee members asked ICANN's board to discard an unusual motion that was railroaded through the GNSO Council. A special GNSO drafting team bypassed the normal policy making process and made a last-minute change in policy in order to give the International Olympic Committee and the Red Cross special privileges in the upcoming new top level domain application process. The drafting team ignored public comments and even tried to short-circuit the public comment process entirely. All 6 NCSG representatives on the Council abstained from what they considered to be an illegitimate proposal. The text of the statement follows.

Dear Dr. Crocker and respected members of the Board,



On behalf of the Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) and its Executive Committee, I am writing to express our hope that the ICANN board will not approve the GNSO’s “Motion to recommend to the Board a Solution to Protect certain Red Cross/Red Crescent (RCRC) and International Olympic Committee (IOC) Names at the Top-Level in new gTLDs.” This motion received a majority vote of the GNSO in its ‘special’ meeting on March 26, 2012.

The special protections created by this resolution raise significant policy issues and, if they are rushed through, will have a detrimental impact upon ICANN’s new gTLD program and international laws and conventions. Furthermore, the whole process by which these special privileges were created raises serious procedural questions. It was for these procedural reasons that the entire NCSG Stakeholder voted to abstain. As a group the NCSG council representatives felt that the entire motion was illegitimate and thus did not even merit a NO vote.

The most worrying aspect of this process  was the treatment of the public comments period. As you are aware, at the Council meeting in Costa Rica, the NCSG requested deferral of this motion because the public comment period had not terminated and, thus, it…

Tomorrow, December 15, 2011,  the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary will meet to markup and potentially vote in committee on H.R. 3261, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” or SOPA. Today the Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - of which ISOC-NY is a member - has written a letter to the House Committee expressing its profound concern with the proposed legislation, and the equivalent PROTECT-IP (PIPA) bill in the U.S. Senate, both of which would mandate the blocking and filtering of the Domain Name System(DNS).

In particular, the NCUC is very concerned with the provisions in both Bills relating to Domain Name System (DNS) filtering. As identified by numerous technical, legal and policy experts:

• DNS filtering is often proposed as a way to block illegal content consumption by end users. Yet policies to mandate DNS filtering will be ineffective for that purpose and will interfere with cross-border data flows and services undermining innovation and social development across the globe.
• Filtering DNS or blocking domain names does not remove the illegal content – it simply makes the content harder to find. Those who are determined to download filtered content can easily use a number of widely available, legitimately-proposed tools to circumvent DNS filtering regimes. As a result, DNS filtering encourages the creation of alternative, non-standard DNS systems.
• DNS filtering and blocking raises human right and freedom of expression concerns, and often curtails international principles regarding the rule of law, due…