Then again, that's probably more money for you.
Zing! And there it is.
Yeah, that's pretty much why I reached the conclusion that volunteering my time for this stuff was as pointless as it was thankless for more than a decade. I'm just rolling around on piles of cash here.
I can assure you that had I never gotten involved with ICANN, I would be much better off than I am today.
Here's where the concept of "sunrise registration" was born (of which the TMCH nonsense is the latest evolution):
https://archive.icann.org/en/dnso/wgb-report-17apr00.htm
That working group ran for 12 months back in 1999 and 2000, and despite all of the various discussions which had gone on under the charter of whether and how to develop protections for "famous marks" in new TLDs, the chair of the group and some unidentified buddy of his came up with the sunrise proposal in the last couple of days and sprung it on the group.
You can scroll down to my comments on that one. I never saw one thin dime from my participation in that group, and several others over the course of years. In fact, one of the reasons why I eventually went solo was that my volunteer activities dealing with ICANN nonsense was at odds with my former firm's billing expectations.
So, that's one glimpse of a year of my life spent for nothing in telephone conferences and emails so that I can have the honor of being told I'm a biased, evil, greedy and faithless lawyer after all.
But having gotten the "oh, you make money from this stuff" line enough times to eventually break this camel's back, I realized that...
I see you have faith in no-one.
I have faith in a lot of things, and have had faith in a lot of things for the last 18 years of time wasted. But I have also a substantial amount of experience at odds with it, including efforts to organize domainers to act in their own bests interests. Do you remember the Domain Name Rights Coalition? No? Oh well. We were fighting this battle under the old NSI trademark dispute policy in 1995. Domainers didn't give much of a shit then either.
Okay, so I was calling out the sunrise bullshit in 2000. We'll skip the 2004 UDRP review and fast forward to the 2011 "issues report" group which was chartered to determine what, if any, changes were needed to the UDRP.
Now, it's pretty clear, and again I refer to the composition of the group to which I provided the link above, that if you are one person and you volunteer to walk into a room of 90 people, most of whom are being paid to be there and disagree with you, then you aren't going to come out with a whole lot of balanced compromise that you are going to like. "Faith" won't fix that.
So that's why, back in 2011, me, Ari Goldberger, and other attorneys who primarily represent domainer interests and have actual experience dealing with the UDRP as it is, were urging that while there could be a number of procedural improvements (which we got, e.g. Rule 17 to avoid gratuitous cybersquatting decisions when the domain was in a bulk purchase etc.), it was preferable to avoid ripping the lid off of the substantive Policy when it's pretty obvious the ICANN deck is stacked against domainers.
I even had one of my own clients take the same line that, "Well, that's because you make money from the system" and it was the beginning of the realization that volunteering my time for years to fight against the exact thing which is happening now was an utter and complete waste of time.
So, thanks for that reminder for me to stay out of these discussions.