[gtld-com] Revision of Committee report (v 3.1)
Colleagues: Thanks to Philip for a good first attempt to reflect the views of the committee. Attached is an edited version of Philip's report, with my proposed edits shown in red. In this cover message I will explain why I made the changes I proposed. Introduction: Delete first sentence of second paragraph: "Participants had in some measure or other a vision of how the gTLD namespace should look." I think many if not most of the committee have no preconceived notion of "how the namespace should look." We believe, rather, that it's "look" should be responsive to demand. At any rate, the sentence is unnecessary. I reworded the concluding section of the same paragraph for a similar reason. To say that the namespace should be "structured in a number of ways" seems both not very meaningful and potentially misleading, in that it implies that there should be some kind of imposed structure, yet there is no support for that in the committee. Item #3. Delete "translation" in sentence three. Our discussion expressly distinguished "translation" from "transliteration." Two NCUC members and, I think, Jordan of the registrars indicated support for permitting translations in IDN TLDs. The idea that translated names should be monopolized by incumbents was explicitly supported only by the incumbent registries. Given the near-complete absence of IDN customers and indigenous IDN TLD operators on this Council, I suggest that we tread very carefully here. My proposed language states that there is a divergence of views on this question. Item #4 The word "sponsored" must be added to the first sentence. The whole discussion of this issue was focused entirely on sponsored domains. This is made clear later, but the first sentence will cause confusion unless amended as shown. Item #5 I agree with the goal of this statement but don't like the wording. The wording implies that the names themselves deceive or confuse users; in fact it is the marketing and business models, not the names per se. Item #8 Add to this paragraph the following sentence: "To the extent that market dominance is a concern, a policy of regular TLD additions according to known procedures, permitting new entry, should be the primary safeguard." Item #10 Delete "as at present." This implies that we are endorsing the current approach to financial qualification, which came in for explicit criticism from a Registry and NCUC representative, as well as implied criticism from others. Add "and should be uniform and objective" to the second sentence. Delete the third sentence - my impression was that these kind of application-specific judgment calls were precisely what Jeff Neuman was criticising (I could be wrong). Item 11: I find a rather amusing contradiction in this statement. Auctions came in for some criticism (mainly by businesses which would prefer to get valuable resources at below market prices, I suspect.). Now tell me: why is it permissible to use arbitrary application fees to "discourage spurious applicants," but not auctions, which reflect actual value in the market? Item #12 We were divided on this question. The report suggests that we were unified a highly conservative, regulatory position. I have proposed a rewording to suggest that ICANN should be concerned with "protection from the consequences of registry failure" only insofar as it can transfer zone file data. Item #15 This item really needs work. First, I hope we can delete the first sentence. It seems to me to be an editorial in favor of a sponsored-only name space. Second, NCUC was not, as the statement implies by omission, the only constituency to favor expansion with both sponsored and unsponsored. I am under the impression (perhaps wrongly) that Registrar and Registry constituencies, or at least prominent members of them, support adding both types in the future. Third, delete all material about auctions in this item. The label of the paragraph indicates that it takes up the issue of sponsored/unsponsored. The issue of auctions is completely unrelated to that, and moreover is something the committee has not considered. Final point. I believe that the Committee badly needs to solicit wider comment and discussion of the report. There is a lot of expertise on this question out there not represented on the Council, which is a very select group. I am especially concerned about representation of the views of Asian and other non-Western script users, which aside from Chun of NCUC are entirely unrepresented here. When will a draft be posted for public comment and how will comments be received and incorporated? gTLDS committee conclusions v3-1.doc |