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Claudio DiGangi
has been a member of ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency for over a decade, and has been elected as the Constituency’s Vice President and Secretary over a five year term. As a key staff member on INTA’s Government Relations team, Mr. DiGangi previously served as the International Trademark Association’s primary public spokesperson on Internet Policy. In this role, he prepared INTA’s congressional testimony and represented the Association in international fora, including the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). More recently, Mr. DiGangi serves as outside counsel on domain name arbitration cases involving illegal schemes to defraud consumers and on corporate data breach investigations to ensure compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). He is a graduate of St. John’s University of School of Law.
Recent Articles by Claudio DiGangi
As the European Union’s landmark Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was set to go into effect in 2018, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) engaged in a series of important, albeit belated, community consultations, with the objective of resolving perceived community concerns with legal compliance of the “Look Up” system (previously called the “WHOIS” system) with data protection laws, such as the GDPR. The end result of the consultations resulted in ICANN adopting a “Temporary Specification” (Temp Spec) – a new contractual provision allowing its accredited-registrars and registries to perform a wholesale redaction of the registration data that has historically been made available to the public.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the California-based nonprofit public-benefit organization with authority over the global Internet’s system of unique identifiers, e.g. IP addresses and domain names, known as generic top-level domains (gTLDs). ICANN’s New gTLD Program has seen the addition of more than 1,200 top-level domains to the Internet’s Domain Name System. Each new gTLD is contractually obligated to provide a set of trademark Rights Protection Mechanisms (RPMs), including mainly the Trademark Claims Service, Sunrise, and the Uniform Rapid Suspension system, discussed more fully below. From the perspective of brand owners, new gTLDs—like the Internet itself—continue to create both opportunities and challenges for protecting intellectual property and serving consumers in the online marketplace.
