At 01/11/2016 12:26 PM, John R. Levine wrote:
While it is overkill to give a blanket ban on every IGO, I would rather give protection to a handful of organizations that don't need it, in return for protecting a number of organizations that would be critically impacted if their names were not protected. I am speaking specifically regarding organizations that do significant public fundraising in the public good -- the Red Cross (+ Red Crescent, etc), UNICEF, UNHCR, and others
This should not be a difficult call. The ALAC is supposed to represent the interests of Internet users. It would be bad if users were confused by a TLD that looked like an international organization but was in fact run by a domain speculator. Users do not care, and we on their behalf do not care, if a reserved name interferes with some speculator's business plan. In view of the ongoing failure of the new gTLD round to attract meaningful interest beyond speculators and criminals, any claim that yet more new TLDs will benefit users is implausible.
So if they have a list of reserved TLD names, reserve them all. From the point of view of the users, it is at worst harmless.
It is clear (to me anyway) that John is right and if it is a binary decision of supporting all acronyms or not, we support. But ALAC also has a responsibility to monitor how ICANN works and try to make sure that our processes do not impede making good decisions. And in this case, we have a level of dysfuntion that may result in ICANN not being able to make the simple binary decision. And that dysfuntion is partly because the GAC has been over-reaching in what they are asking. My classic case is that according to their request, the acronym ISO has nothing to do with standards but rather the International Sugar Organization. The other problem is that at the moment, it is not a question of the ALAC supporting this decision to reserve IGO acronyms. It is a question how we GET to that point given that the GNSO is unlikely to recommend to the Board to do this. Alan