American Administration involved in .WINE & .VIN new gTLDs?

I was recently informed that "the American Administration" would try to, or "would have tried to" tell .WINE & .VIN applicants to stop talking to French wine institutions regarding possible solutions on the protection of Wine Geographical Indications.

I have absolutely no idea if this is true or not but there are different reasons why this could be attempted:

1. The GAC has not enough knowledge about domain names and/or new gTLDs to help solve the problem and it causes more trouble than needed with this issue. At this point it's better if it stops causing more trouble. Ex: I don't know who had the brilliant idea to raise an early warning on .VIN and not on .WINE but I wonder if it is not the GAC in which case I agree if the situation is handled differently.
2. There is an issue with .WINE and .VIN new gTLDs and ICANN knows it. If nothing is done about these 2 strings...it would mean ICANN doesn't care about protecting wine GIs: this could cause more trouble in the future.
3. Applicants know there is an issue with these 2 strings and it is possible they know it is too late already so they play the watch. Playing the watch can mean several things:
1. "We don't want to protect .wine and .vin domain names because we could sell less domain names" (note I completely disagree with this) so let's just try to force it through;
2. "We don't want to protect .wine and .vin domain names because it means more work for us and we don't care enough about these strings to spend more time on this (these)";
3. "If we add more protection mechanisms, it will block future Registrants from buying and we don't want that" (note I also disagree with this);
4. "French are as good in business as their President is good at Presiding and American, Irish and Gibraltar Champagne are as good as theirs so why would we listen to their requests?";
5. "What? We never received any requests from them to solve the wine Geographical Indications question: did we miss something?";
6. "We applied: why didn't they come with a Community application then?";
7. "If we don't answer their requests, maybe the ICANN board will just drop it".

Of course I could invent may others but there is another one...

..."what if the ICANN board forces us to use these protection mechanisms for all of our other applications? Maybe we should just not answer then".

More soon.

Next new gTLD Applicant Webinar: 08 August 2013

Date/Time: 08 August 2013, 01:00 – 2:30 UTC (07 Aug, 6:00pm – 7:30pm PDT)

• Information on evaluation progress and program developments;
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More information here.