[ga] The North American UDRP

[DannyYounger@cs.com]

As an organization, we talk a lot about the importance of geographic 
diversity... but do we practice it?  There is a debate under way in the Names 
Council regarding the geographical composition of the UDRP Task Force.  In 
her message to the Council, Elisabeth Porteneuve has noted:

the simple arithmetics is:
   16 - NA, 14 NA plus two Chairs
    3 - EU
    1 - LAC
    1 - AF
    1 - AP

In a later message she states:  "I maintain my objection to the composition 
of UDRP TF - this group
is not international."   Subsequently, Elisabeth introduced the following 
motion:  

"the geographic diversity of TF must be granted, no one geographic region may 
be represented by more than one third of members in any TF"

As could be predicted, Philip Sheppard does not concur and states:  "Please 
consider the TF as valid and start its work directly."  Fortunately, other NC 
members are siding with Elisabeth, and hopefully the debate will continue for 
a while longer yet.  

This is but one of the many problems that occurs when the NC chooses to use a 
small closed Task Force rather than a large open Working Group.  

It has been noted in the recent "Report of the Internationalized Domain Names 
Internal Working Group of the ICANN Board of Directors" that "the deployment 
of IDNs will increase the opportunity for cybersquatting. Survey participants 
recommended a variety of measures, particularly increased use of UDRP 
arbitrators familiar with non-Latin scripts, to combat this problem."  A UDRP 
Task Force that does not contain a sufficient number of members familiar with 
codes of Law other than North American/European or language sets other than 
Latin-character-based is destined to perform poorly.

We are in a global environment.  I encourage the NC to add additional members 
to its Task Force to better represent the rest of the world Internet 
community.

As consensus in this Task Force is decided by a simple majority vote, the 
current member composition guarantees that the North American point of view 
will necessarily prevail.   This is not consensus; it is capture.





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