It's also worth noting that almost the same issue exists with the dot-gay community ruling.
A third party evaluator made their evaluation. It doesn't seem right to a lot of people. But ICANN's accountability processes are only capable of looking at process rather than correctness of decision.
I think Bruce's engineer comment is very useful in that it highlights not only how ICANN has got things wrong in some areas but also why there is a significant disconnect between different groups.
The fact is that new gTLDs go beyond mere technical considerations: an "i" looking similar to an "l". They are words, and people associate meaning to them. That is the case both for users and for applicants.
ICANN wants to apply technical rules to human issues and when that doesn't work it calls in legal argument. Legal argument then immediately creates an adversarial relationship between ICANN and whoever want to be heard.
In the human world here is what happens:
* Technical rules fail to account for all possibilities
* As a result there is a bad call
* The person at the end of the bad call wants people to take a look at it
* ICANN refuses to listen
* They get annoyed
In the ICANN world, this is what happens:
* The rules were created by everyone
* The rules were followed
* Someone didn't like the rules so they are trying to force a change to them
* We need to protect the rules or the system will break down
* This person is threatening the organization by challenging the rules
There are two fundamental beliefs that are behind ICANN corporate's inability to see how it needs to change to deal with these persistent problems:
1. You can't admit fault
2. Process is the answer
Both are wrong.
ICANN can - and should - admit fault. It should be able to say: we created these rules to the best of our knowledge but we didn't account for this possibility. In this case the rules did not provide the right answer.
And second, the blind belief in process as a panacea when it often creates distrust and exacerbates the problem. As we have seen from this dot-hotels example, the different process steps kept giving back the same answer because they asked basically the same question each time.
But the right question was never asked. ICANN may have "won" but we all know that the problem that was there at the start is still there and still hasn't been tackled: is "hotels" and "hoteis" really similar in this context? Would they really cause widespread confusion?
As I think George Sadowsky pointed out, the fact is that most content on a "hoteis" website is likely to be in Portuguese. That is going to create a much stronger dissonance than someone mistaking an 'i" for an 'l" in the browser bar.
George was applying human judgment. But ICANN continues to undervalue that approach. It's perhaps not surprising given the organization's technical background and remit. But it is time to change.
Legal process needs to be put at the end of the line, when everything else has failed, not as the first port of call. And human judgement needs to be inserted at the post-implementation stage.
Kieren