The Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) believes that ICANN policies governing the publication of Whois data must be reformed, and quickly. The Operational Point of Contact Proposal ("OPoC Proposal") presented in this Whois Task Force Report is not perfect, but it is the only way to bring some consensus and closure to a problem that has festered for too long. ....
NCUC continues to strongly object to the principles and recommendations in the GNSO New TLD Committee’s Draft Final Report on the Introduction of New Generic Top-Level Domains (14 Nov. 2006). In particular, the proposed selection criteria for strings and dispute resolution processes over new gTLDs remain deeply problematic. The draft recommendations must be substantially reformed in order to promote competition and innovation and protect freedom of expression and non-commercial uses in the new gTLD space. The GNSO Committee’s draft proposal would have ICANN engage in massive and unprecedented censorship over the use words and ideas in cyberspace. The draft recommendations propose that ICANN mediate between competing standards of religion and morality to evaluate who is entitled to what words or ideas and how they may be used in new gTLDs. They essentially propose that ICANN be deputized the “word police†for the Internet.
ICANN’s Non-Commercial User Constituency (NCUC) welcomes the London School of Economics (LSE) report on the GNSO and urges the Board to implement many, but not all, of its recommendations. ... The existing [GNSO] structure gives business, particularly entertainment companies or other intellectual property interests, too much power in GNSO policy making and an unfair advantage. Non-commercial interests should be given equal weight to commercial interests in GNSO policy making as a matter of principle. ...
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) appreciates the efforts of the U.S. Delegation to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to advance a signal-theft-based approach in the negotiations on the WIPO Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasts and Broadcasting Organizations, and urges you to continue to work to ensure that any WIPO broadcasting treaty does not impede the ability of the world’s consumers to benefit from developments in home and personal network technologies. ....
"... This year, the US Federal Trade Commission has announced that now in the US, online data mining is the number one crime. Privacy experts, in particular, EPIC, have testified that it is the Whois database that is one of the most significant contributors to this problem. We need to pay some attention to the security interests of ordinary, everyday Internet users who register domain names, and not just the large intellectual property rights holders. They have legal mechanisms at their disposal if someone is violating their rights. It's called due process of law. I really haven't heard any explanation for why legal due process should be circumvented in this case. ..."
Join ICANN's Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) on 5 Dec. at the ICANN Board Meeting in Sáo Paulo, Brazil for a discussion on ICANN's Whois personal database policy and its implication for the privacy rights of Internet users.
The undersigned public interest organizations wish to request a public and recordable meeting with the US delegation to WIPO before the Special Session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), First Session January 17, 2007 to January 19, 2007 (Geneva, Switzerland). The undersigned respectfully request that the USPTO or/and the Library of Congress (LOC) invite formal public comments on the proposal to create a new International Treaty obligation establishing a novel intellectual property regime for broadcasting and cablecasting organizations, through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). We believe it is important to have public comments on the impact on U.S. law and affected constituencies if the U.S. or any other country were to ratify a new WIPO Treaty embodying that proposal.
The inaugural meeting of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is officially over, but it is really only the beginning. An outgrowth of 2003-2005 World Summit of Information Society (WSIS), the IGF, a 4-day multi-stakeholder dialogue forum for policy issues related to "Internet Governance", was held 30 October - 2 November 2006 in Athens, Greece, the birthplace of democracy. Over 1500 participants from governments, civil society, and business came from all corners of the world with a vision of building an "Internet for Development", the meeting's official theme. Internet policy discussions were grouped into 4 main categories: openness, security, diversity, and access. Each of 4 policy themes were discussed in a main plenary session and a number of complementary workshops. ...
The Mandate of the IGF The mandate of the IGF is set out in Paragraph 72 of the Tunis Agenda: 72. We ask the UN Secretary-General, in an open and inclusive process, to convene, by the second quarter of 2006, a meeting of the new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue—called the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).The [...]
Today at the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), I participated on the Internet Bill of Rights Workshop to discuss the creation of an “Internet Bill of Rights†to articulate the global rights and duties of Internet users from the viewpoint of the individual. Check out some video clips from the workshop ...