Re: [gtld-com] Regarding seeking public comment on thecommittee's draft

["Milton Mueller" <mueller@syr.edu>]

Bruce and other Council members:

Based on your reminder of the process, Bruce, it is now 
evident that the current gTLD committee has gotten 
out of hand and needs to be reminded of what it was asked 
to do by the Board.

Here's what the Board requested in its 15 December 2002
meeting:

"the Board requests the GNSO to provide a recommendation 
[snip] on whether to structure the evolution of the generic 
top level namespace and, if so, how to do so."

Now to put this request in context, the question about "structure" 
emerged directly from the Presidents Action plan and related 
discussions in Amsterdam, which raised the issue of a TLD name 
"taxonomy." The President's report posed basically two paths
for future name space expansion: top-down structure, or 
bottom-up market driven. They asked for advice on which 
one GNSO preferred.

It seems to me that the Board's question could be answered
very simply and directly by item 7 of the proposed report,
which says:

"7. Expansion of the gTLD namespace should be a bottom-up 
approach with names proposed by the interested parties to ICANN. 
There is no support for a pre-determined list of new names that 
putative registries would bid for. Expansion should be demand-driven. 
It should be sufficient that a viable demand is perceived by the name 
applicant and no objective test should be required."

In other words, no structure, and therefore no need for 
a proposal as to "how to structure" the name space. 

I would, therefore, now move that we adopt paragraph 7
as the report in its entirely, and consider our work finished. 
No one has objected to any aspect of that paragraph so far.
Unless there are objections I don't know about, we have 
answered the Board's question. We are done.

We were not asked for a comprehensive policy regarding 
name space expansion. Yet, if you look at the rest of the proposed 
report, you find that the Council is now discussing translations and 
transliterations of international domain names, performance bonds, 
sponsored vs. unsponsored, competition policy, policies for registry 
failure, and on and on. 

It's out of scope. These issues are far too complex to 
be settled in a few casual discussions, especially the issues
regarding IDNs. 

Anyway, if we allow this task force to mutate into a vehicle for 
creating a comprehensive plan for name space expansion,
then the current procedural plan is drastically inadequate, because it
contains no requirement for public comment, not even an
opportunity for open and public constituency comment. 

That should not happen. 

>>> "Bruce Tonkin" <Bruce.Tonkin@melbourneit.com.au> 04/14/03 07:17PM >>>

>At the council meeting this week under agenda item 9, it may be 
>appropriate for the council  to consider putting the current draft of 
>the committee's "advice" out for comment, before the GNSO council 
>formally ratifies the committee's advice in the 22 May 2003 meeting of the GNSO Council.