The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has just told ICANN to drop the notion of applying the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) dispute resolution system to .Travel and other legacy gTLDs without undertaking a full Policy Development Process (PDP).

In a June 12 letter, EFF stated:

ICANN should not apply URS to the .travel domain, or to any additional domains, by the unaccountable means of staff inserting new conditions into the renewal of the registry operator’s contract. Rather, the public policy implications of such a move demand that a full PDP be undertaken first.

EFF’s letter also states:

The introduction of the URS, in response to a 2009 recommendation from the new gTLD program’s Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT), was characterized (however dubiously) as an implementation detail of the new gTLD program…The URS never became a consensus policy that would be applicable across all gTLDs…If the URS is to be extended to legacy domains such as .travel, this would place many further domains at risk of rapid suspension, which raises significant free speech concerns. It would also set a bad precedent for the extension of the URS to other legacy domains such as .com, .net and .org as their registries’ contracts come up for renewal.

ICANN contracting staff decided to impose the URS on .Travel based upon the misguided notion that it was more important “to increase the consistency of registry agreements across all gTLDs” than to act consistently with ICANN’s Bylaws. They didn’t even wait for their colleagues in the policy department to deliver the ‘Issues Report on new gTLD RPMs’ to the GNSO Council this coming September. One of the reasons the GNSO Council requested that report was so the GNSO could decide if those RPMs should become Consensus Policy for all gTLDs.

And it’s not just .Travel targeted by this staff power grab. Two weeks after publishing that proposed Registry Agreement (RA) ICANN published the proposed RAs for .Cat and .Pro, which also contain the URS. You can draw a dot-ted line through those registries that brings the URS to .org, .net and .com when they come up for renewal as de facto, staff-determined policy absent any demonstrated community consensus.

And when the URS reaches those big legacy domains, what will it look like? A review of the Report of Public Comments on the “Draft Report: Rights Protection Mechanisms Review” makes clear that if certain interests have their way the URS could be changed in the future to become an accelerated, lower-cost version of the UDRP, with the same burden of proof plus a domain transfer option. The result of transforming URS into URT (Uniform Rapid Transfer) would be more opportunities for domain hijackers and far less due process for domain registrants.

Whether the URS should change, much less if it should become a consensus policy for legacy gTLDs, are important policy decisions that should be decided by ICANN’s multistakeholder community through the standard PDP—not imposed in an unaccountable top down manner by ICANN staff.

EFF has made a valuable contribution to ICANN accountability by expressing its strong opposition to this high-handed attempt to short-circuit proper decision-making procedures. Let’s hope that more organizations and individuals speak out while the public comment period on these RAs remain open—and at the upcoming ICANN meeting in Buenos Aires.