UN, IMF, WTO, Other Organizations Raise Concern About New Domains

By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch

The United Nations, International Monetary Fund and over 20 other international organisations have expressed concerns over the opening up of the internet domain name system for new generic top level domains (gTLDs) like .nyc or .news.

The letter [pdf] was filed into the record at a second hearing in the United States Congress on the start of the application program for the new names by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California-based non-profit organisation with technical oversight of the internet. According to a copy of the letter received by Intellectual Property Watch, UN and IMF lawyers wrote that “the IGO (intergovernmental organization) community concerns relate to the increased potential for the misleading registration and use of IGO names and acronyms in the domain name system under ICANN’s significant expansion plans.”

At the hearing today of the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, several members of Congress urged ICANN again to delay the start of the application period on 12 January, or start with smaller batches of names. ICANN Vice President Kurt Pritz, meanwhile, said ICANN knew that it was done with the preparations because all the issues had been addressed over a period of seven years and now there was only a debate about nuances left.

Organisations signing on include the UN World Intellectual Property Organization, UN International Telecommunication Union, World Trade Organization, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (birthplace of the World Wide Web), and the African Development Bank.