Thursday, April 4th, 2013

Department of Commerce not backing .mail objections.

Lawrence Strickling, U.S. Department of Commerce

Lawrence Strickling, U.S. Department of Commerce

Last week I wrote about how the United States Postal Service filed objections to all of the top level domain applications for .mail.

It’s a big waste of money, as in order to prevail the USPS would have to show it has some sort of legal rights to the term “mail”.

ICANN just published a letter from Lawrence Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information at the U.S. Department of Commerce, saying that it does not support the objections:

    Please be advised that the objections filed by the United States Postal Service (USPS) to the seven applications for the proposed new generic top level domain, .mail, are not supported by the coordinated view of the United States Government (USG). Consistent with our commitment to the multistakeholder model, the USG will present its coordinated views to the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) as it forms its consensus advice to the Board on these matters.

It would seem that, other than perhaps finding the objections without merit, the Department of Commerce is a bit miffed that USPS filed objections on its own, possibly without communicating with the DOC.