Group says that it spurred ICANN to take action.
As Jeff Neumann commented last week, Dot Hip Hop has withdrawn its reconsideration request regarding the assignment of the .hiphop TLD from Uniregistry to Dot Hip Hop (DHH). It’s only the thirteenth withdrawal of a reconsideration request at ICANN since 1999. In its letter to the ICANN Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee, DHH noted:
…We are doing this because we believe that no matter how uncomfortable this action was for DHH, the request served its initial purpose. It is certainly an unfortunate undertaking, but we believe it was necessary to help move the process forward and seems to have done well to open up the channels of communication.
As a result of our formal withdrawal of Reconsideration Request 21-3, it is our expectation that DHH’s request for the assignment of .hiphop will immediately be put back on track without the need for a “pause” in the process, as stated in ICANN’s December 22, 2021, letter to DHH…
As part of the team behind Dot Hip Hop, Neumann had characterized ICANN’s decision to “pause” the assignment process as retaliation against Dot Hip Hop for calling out the delay in processing the assignment requests. ICANN addressed that contention in a recent blog post.
The withdrawal letter, which has not been published on ICANN’s RR 21-3 archive page as of Monday, states that the initial goal of the reconsideration request was to get ICANN into action on the stalled .hiphop transfer application. A glance through the history of ICANN’s reconsideration process shows that the likelihood of successfully protesting actions or inactions by ICANN’s board or staff is rare. ICANN has dismissed or denied the vast majority of the 178 reconsideration requests that have been made.
However, sometimes a reconsideration request can result in a policy refinement or a process improvement. In 2001, RR 01-5 led to a formal mechanism for Board designation of policies to the Internet Coordination Policy list. In 2018, RR 18-10 sparked additional process refinements regarding ICANN work with countries in the Amazon region as .amazon applications were considered. Or, as RR 21-3: Dot Hip Hop highlights, making a reconsideration request can draw attention to an issue while prodding ICANN org into offering an explanation if not taking more immediate action.
