God with the Durban Communiqué — GAC plays

Fresh TLD applicants’ disdain for the GAC must be growing.

The Governmental Advisory Committee has released its Durban Communiqué (pdf), summarizing what it did during this stretch’s meeting in Durban and its advice to ICANN’s board.

Even as someone who’s not directly involved with fresh TLD applications, I have to admit I got angry reading the Communiqué.

I think this sums up my reaction:

Just who do these guys think they are?

It’s almost as if the GAC knows they’re making crazy demands, but they’re requesting them with a straight face.

Consider that the GAC now wants to create a mechanism that’s a cross between the Trademark Clearinghouse and a preemptive UDRP for any acronym of an intergovernmental organization that someone wants to register.

Or that it demanded that applications for .wine and .vin ought to be put on on hold for another 30 days while the GAC figures out what it wants to do with these generic domains. In other words, it can’t get its act together, so people who have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars are just going to have to wait.

It’s also demanding that all of Amazon.com’s .amazon applications (in English and otherwise) be killed. It wants Thai gone, too.

It did not release any further clarification on its boneheaded Beijing Communiqué, which effectively threw nearly a third of all applications into delay.

Given how I feel regarding the GAC’s “advice”, I can’t imagine if I had my own money invested in fresh TLDs.