RE: what problem are we solving? (was Re: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs)

* Frank Bulk - iNAME · * Sat Jun 28 13:49:52 2008

One way to provide protection is too allow those who have the domain portion
of any domain.(com|net|org|...) to have first dibs for the domain of any new
gTLD.  i.e. if nanog.org, nanog.com, nanog.net, etc. would have first dibs
on nanog.thisisgreatstuff.

Or is that too simplistic and fraught with division?

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: David Conrad [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2008 7:50 AM
To: WWWhatsup
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: what problem are we solving? (was Re: ICANN opens up Pandora's
Box of new TLDs)

On Jun 27, 2008, at 8:59 PM, WWWhatsup wrote:
> David Conrad wrote:
>> With that said, personally, I agree that more attention should be
>> spent on the welfare of the registrants.  Unfortunately, given I work
>> for ICANN, my providing comments in the RAA public consultation along
>> those lines would be a bit ... awkward.
>
> Would you agree with Danny Younger (I believe this is his position)
> then that there should be a
> properly constituted & recognized registrants constituency?

Obviously speaking personally, conceptually I agree, but the challenge
here has always been how do you "properly constitute and recognize
registrants" in a way that doesn't allow for capture.  For example,
you could say 'only folks who have domain names can be part of that
constituency', but in reality, the majority of domain names are held
by registrars.  You could add the restriction that 'registrants' must
be natural persons, but how would one verify this across the entire
planet?  It obviously isn't impossible, but people already complain
about how big ICANN is -- I can't see how having some mechanism to
validate a registrant constituency won't make ICANN _much_ larger...

However, lacking this, I personally believe there should be strong
explicit registrant protections built into the RAA.  But that's just me.

Regards,
-drc