Earlier this week, members of the Shop.org Policy Advisory Group came to Washington to participate in the National Retail Federation’s annual Washington Leadership Conference.  Members of the Group received briefings from Congressional Leaders, and met with government representatives on a variety of issues of concern to the Shop.org and NRF communities. 

The conference opened with a keynote address from Transportation secretary Ray LaHood, covered in the NRF’s Blog. Wednesday morning, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., and Senate Finance Committee member Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, outlined issues pending in Congress that will affect the retail industry.

Two key issues that were highlighted during the conference:

• Behavioral targeting – As pointed out in Scott Silverman’s March 12th blog post, this is an issue that’s on the radar of the FTC.  There’s an opportunity now for industry to lead the way, prior to greater government involvement.
• New global Top Level Domains from ICANN – ICANN is on a path to potentially add over 1,000 new gTLDs (to an existing universe of 240, including familiar TLDs, such as .com, .gov.mil) in the next few years, with application fees starting at $190,000.  This is of significant concern to businesses, especially those with well known brands, due to substantially increased financial burdens in fighting trademark infringement and the promotion of trademark confusion and dilution.

Stay tuned to the blog for more developments.  If you’re interested in being involved, signup for Policy information.

-Josh