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[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



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