Kurt Pritz responds to Congress.

ICANN Senior Vice President Kurt Pritz has responded (pdf) to a written question and expanded on his answers to questioning from U.S. representatives during a hearing about new TLDs on May 4.

Representative Howard Coble submitted a written question asking if ICANN was going to make special arrangements for “brand” top level domain names should a brand owner decide to wind down operation of the new top level domain name.

At the time of the hearing there was no such provision, and the .brand TLD could have been run by another entity. Since then, and perhaps in response to Coble’s question, a provision has been added to eliminate this problem and allow .brand owners to close their TLDs.

Pritz also provided more detailed answers to questions including:

-Why new gTLDs should be introduced
-If there will be a globally protected marks list (the community doesn’t want it)
-If anyone at ICANN has a financial incentive to approve the program by June (no, just meeting deadlines to prepare the board for its decision)
-If there are any safeguards against introducing new TLDs that are racial epithets (there’s a process)