gTLDs – Centre on Knowledge Governance

An Open Letter to the ICANN Community: Not the Community Priority Evaluation We Intended

InfoJustice Eds. / 25 July, 2025

This post was originally published on CircleID by Kathy Kleiman To the ICANN Community, Today, I share a warning about serious changes to the Community Priority Evaluation (CPE) of the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook. They are not driven by public comment, but by a few voices within the SubPro Implementation Review Team—and they are very likely to lead to disastrous misappropriation of well-known community names, including those of Tribes, Indigenous Peoples and NGOs around the world. The reason why is that we (the ICANN Community) envisioned.CHEROKEE for the Cherokee Nation and other tribes, peoples and NGOs, not a group that loves their Grand Cherokee and Jeep Cherokee cars and jeeps. But the policy written by the SubPro PDP Working Group (2016-2020) and accepted by the GNSO Council and ICANN Board recently was deeply changed—and replaced with a scoring system that eliminates the ability of well-known communities to stop unrelated groups, or a fraction of their community, or a group completely opposed to them from using the same name as a new gTLD, provided the applicant has some semblance of internal organization and activity. This change will result in the misappropriation of well-known community names and great harm that we never intended when we wrote the policy. The Subsequent Procedures PDP Working Group (meeting 2016-2020) was fairly balanced in its recommendations for both the applicant and communities that might oppose the CPE application. I share some of the language showing the independence of the Community Experts on the CPE panel to research and other communities and tribes to send comments and letters of opposition and raise concerns—all to be taken into account in the CPE evaluation. Final Report, 2020. Unfortunately and very recently, a few members of the SubPro Implementation Review Team (“IRT”), a group charged with implementing policy, not rewriting it, made change after change to the language, terms and scoring of the Community Priority Evaluation (“CPE”) rules. In April, they stripped out carefully negotiated policies and balances to create an unfair advance for applicants—including by new rules telling the CPE Panelists to greatly limit the use their expertise and independent research skills and not to weigh heavily external opposition and comments they may receive. The changes are buried in Module 4: Contention Set Resolution, 4.4 Community Priority Evaluation, pages 133-150, of the final draft of the Applicant Guidebook now out for public comment. If you look at the new CPE scoring system—called Community Priority Evaluation Criteria (Section 4.4.7, p.139 in draft AGB)—in the edited versions (“redlines” that I share from the IRT on April 14, 2025, and April 30, 2025, and a special redline combining both sets of edits that I created), you will see the hands of the CPE Panelists are newly “tied” and they cannot engage in the research and application of their knowledge that the adopted policy requires. Sadly, under the new changes: And these are just a few examples. Under this new language—newly shared with the community and not arising from public comment—self-identified communities will win CPE. What a prize for the applicant (no auction) and what a tragedy for the peoples, tribes and NGOs of the same name and for far longer than the applicant! Overall, if these rules are adopted, we can predict that letters and comments of heartfelt opposition against CPE applicants will pour into ICANN, only to be systematically ignored by the Panel because of these recent changes to scoring and evaluation criteria. As shared above, this April editing came not from accepted policy, but from a few strong voices on the SubPro IRT. I fear disastrous misappropriation of the well-known names of peoples, tribes and communities if recent changes to CEP text and scoring are not reversed, and the original language is not restored. If you agree, I ask you to write a small set of comments—and share you how to do it below—as it will make a different. Thank you for reading and caring, Kathy Kleiman, Co-Founder ICANN’s Noncommercial Users Constituency To Submit a Comment in ICANN’s Open Proceeding on the Final Draft of the Applicant Guidebook, due July 23rd. Thank you! Footnotes

WIPO Report on UDRP lacks structural separation and data, and throws aside clear free speech protections in the global domain name system

Twenty-five years ago, the then-new Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) adopted a virtual dispute policy for domain names as its first “consensus policy” and that policy is now due to be reviewed. A comment filed last week by PIJIP professors and fellows Christine Farley, Kathryn Kleiman and Patricia Aufderheide, together with Rebecca Tushnet, Harvard Law School, Michael Karanicolas, Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University, and Mitch Stoltz, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, laid bare a deep set of concerns about the troubling role of WIPO in writing this report and key recommendations that it made. In this report , WIPO casts itself as the leader of the review of ICANN’s Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy, or “UDRP,” yet as pointed out in the PIJIP comments, the role of WIPO raises key structural concerns as WIPO is the world’s leading provider of domain name dispute services. Specifically, the comment calls for structural separation: “[In 1999] WIPO became the first ICANN-approved generic top level domain (gTLD) domain name dispute providers, and changed its role from rule-maker to dispute forum. This changes the place of WIPO in the process – as a forum convener, not a rule creator… which means that it is difficult—if not impossible—for WIPO to ask hard questions about core structures and to make comparisons to other existing (NIC Chile) and possible systems.” The comment also questions the lack of comprehensive data analysis in the WIPO-ICA Review – analysis of data that after 25 years is available in abundance: “After 25 years and over 64,000 UDRP cases brought to WIPO for domain names in the generic top level domain (gTLDs), we expected data: substantive, clear, neutral and statistically valid data. After all, as the first ICANN-approved UDRP dispute provider, WIPO holds this data from the very first UDRP dispute in December 1999 to current ones in June 2025… Yet, this WIPO-ICA Report defaults to the old method of anecdotal evidence: Interviews with the ‘usual suspects’ of well-known people who spend a considerable part of their lives thinking about the UDRP.” Further, the comment raises deep free speech concerns about a recommendation by WIPO to reveal the names of speakers without their consent. It calls for all UDRP Providers in the future to follow the current practices of WIPO (privately adopted) and disclose the names of domain name registrants against whom a UDRP is filed with very limited exceptions (data now redacted due to GDPR and other comprehensive data protection laws). Our comment strongly disagreed on free speech grounds: “For the cost of a UDRP filing, currently $1500 for a single-panelist at WIPO, the report recommends that rules and ethics protecting privacy, anonymity and free speech be thrown aside. The identity of a person or party speaking, critiquing, or criticizing can be revealed to the complainant, even if the registrant is fully protected under their national laws and rights of free expression and privacy, including the right to anonymity and pseudonymity.” This is only the first volley in UDRP review that is likely to take place over the next few years at ICANN. If you are interested in this material, and especially the fairness and balance of future UDRP rules, and would like to be involved in further discussion, please contact Kathryn Kleiman, Senior Policy Fellow of PIJIP, at Kleiman@american.edu. Links: [1] WIPO-ICA UDRP Review Report of April 2025 can be found here. [2] Our comments can be found here. [3] All comments to this report can be found here.