Re: [ALAC] Something we didn't think about.
For the record, it was sent for its interest, not because I thought it needed our formal attention. Funny, curious, interesting are all words that come to mind. Alan At 21/08/2013 12:38 AM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
I'm not overly concerned about this from an end users perspective.
This is a matter between warring parties within ICANN's commercial sectors and IMO well beyond ALAC's sphere of concern. As soon as any application for the string was judged to be non-confusing, what little interest At-Large had in this matter vanished.
From an end-users PoV on confusing strings, the domain name system is already well-poisoned. ICANN has already been seen to be silent when registrars deliberately use the confusion between .COM and .CO as a selling point. (That CC names are beyond ICANN's ability to manage -- even when being used as generics -- is a subtlety lost on the public.) And If nobody cares about the confusion between .COM and .CO, then it's hard to get suddenly concerned about confusion between .CAM and .COM (and also .CA or .CAT, for that matter) and even harder to want to get involved in the associated infighting.
The only product that I have extracted from this event is entertainment. I find the variety in rulings (two applications for a string non-confusing, but a third application for the exactly same string judged to be confusing) to be highly amusing in its inconsistency. As Alan has said, the AGB rules don't anticipate this, so a few more lawyers will be blessing ICANN's existence to pay for their Range Rovers.
Certainly there are those who won't find this funny, But to someone like me who believes the current gTLD expansion is a stupendous mistake, this event is just Business as Usual. It's one more demonstration of the many unintended consequences that such a botched effort was sure to produce. Many have been revealed so far and there sill surely be more to come, including some that will be far more severe than this. And given its scale, its complexity, and the sheer greed that motivated much of it, anticipating all consequences of the expansion was simply impossible.
IMO, one of ALAC's ongoing roles in this is to track and filter these consequences, focused on minimizing harm from those after-effects that will affect end-users. This is not one of them, from what I can tell.
- Evan
On 20 August 2013 12:57, Alan Greenberg <<mailto:alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca>alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca> wrote: At 20/08/2013 11:53 AM, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:
On 20/08/2013 17:20, Alan Greenberg wrote:
Hindsight says that we should have insisted that all string similarity objections be groups together, suing the sum-total of the arguments for and against. But in our collective wisdom, we didn't. Substitute /we/ with /ICANN/
Not really, that was a real WE. Plenty of opportunities for all of us to have caught this earlier...
Also, nice Freudian slip of suing -> using.
Oops
_______________________________________________ ALAC mailing list <mailto:ALAC@atlarge-lists.icann.org>ALAC@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/alac
At-Large Online: <http://www.atlarge.icann.org>http://www.atlarge.icann.org ALAC Working Wiki: <https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/At-Large+Advisory+Committee+(ALAC)>https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/At-Large+Advisory+Committee+(ALAC)
-- Evan Leibovitch Toronto Canada Em: evan at telly dot org Sk: evanleibovitch Tw: el56
On 21 August 2013 12:06, Alan Greenberg <alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca> wrote:
For the record, it was sent for its interest, not because I thought it needed our formal attention.
My comments were related to: *"Not really, that was a real WE. Plenty of opportunities for all of us to
have caught this earlier..."*
I agree with Olivier that this was not the kind of thing that "we" needed to be on the lookout for as the issue, in itself, has no main relevance to At-Large. Of course, with every day that goes by, some new unintended consequence shows up. (or maybe some of these consequences were intended, but certainly nasty in intent if so) - The wild and weird world of objection processes - "Priority roulette" - Prioritisation (and the aftermath of poor categorisation) - IDN variants - Applicant support (or rather, the general inaccessibility of the expansion in much of the world) - The tempest that is "Closed generics" - Compliance scaling - When is a community a real community? And who tells the difference - Confusion over string confusion - Making sense of the GAC's confused responses - The boondoggle about metrics - The aborted HSTLD effort And surely there are more to come. I really really would like to have ALAC advocate that, after IDNs, dot-brands and a few of the first "open" gTLDs are launched. ICANN take a breath and wait at least six months or so to see what happens before going on with the others. While I still think the whole expansion was a colossal mistake, it is not against the aims of ALAC to suggest slowing down the release of TLDs to determine the public real-world consequences. The word "delay" has been taken as a profanity within the ICANN bubble, but I see no reason for ALAC to support an ongoing blind rush into the unknown. There is NO end-user demand for hundreds of TLDs. And nobody can prove my statement incorrect because no research has been done on the subject. We can barely do a survey on the Applicant Support program, let alone on global public demand for the whole gTLD expansion. - Evan
Evan, what's a boondoggle and HSTLD? Rinalia On Aug 22, 2013 4:22 AM, "Evan Leibovitch" <evan@telly.org> wrote:
On 21 August 2013 12:06, Alan Greenberg <alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca> wrote:
For the record, it was sent for its interest, not because I thought it needed our formal attention.
My comments were related to:
*"Not really, that was a real WE. Plenty of opportunities for all of us to
have caught this earlier..."*
I agree with Olivier that this was not the kind of thing that "we" needed to be on the lookout for as the issue, in itself, has no main relevance to At-Large.
Of course, with every day that goes by, some new unintended consequence shows up. (or maybe some of these consequences were intended, but certainly nasty in intent if so)
- The wild and weird world of objection processes - "Priority roulette" - Prioritisation (and the aftermath of poor categorisation) - IDN variants - Applicant support (or rather, the general inaccessibility of the expansion in much of the world) - The tempest that is "Closed generics" - Compliance scaling - When is a community a real community? And who tells the difference - Confusion over string confusion - Making sense of the GAC's confused responses - The boondoggle about metrics - The aborted HSTLD effort
And surely there are more to come.
I really really would like to have ALAC advocate that, after IDNs, dot-brands and a few of the first "open" gTLDs are launched. ICANN take a breath and wait at least six months or so to see what happens before going on with the others. While I still think the whole expansion was a colossal mistake, it is not against the aims of ALAC to suggest slowing down the release of TLDs to determine the public real-world consequences.
The word "delay" has been taken as a profanity within the ICANN bubble, but I see no reason for ALAC to support an ongoing blind rush into the unknown. There is NO end-user demand for hundreds of TLDs. And nobody can prove my statement incorrect because no research has been done on the subject. We can barely do a survey on the Applicant Support program, let alone on global public demand for the whole gTLD expansion.
- Evan _______________________________________________ ALAC mailing list ALAC@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/alac
At-Large Online: http://www.atlarge.icann.org ALAC Working Wiki: https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/At-Large+Advisory+Committee+(ALA...)
On 21 August 2013 20:10, Rinalia Abdul Rahim <rinalia.abdulrahim@gmail.com>wrote:
Evan, what's a boondoggle and HSTLD?
Rinalia
Boondoggle: "a project that is considered a useless waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy motivations." See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boondoggle_(project) HSTLD: The brief and aborted ICANN addvisory group, created to design a "High Security TLD" designation See: http://icannwiki.com/index.php/HSTLD (I was the only ALAC representative on that group<http://archive.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/hstld-volunteers-23dec09-en.pdf> ) - Evan
participants (3)
-
Alan Greenberg -
Evan Leibovitch -
Rinalia Abdul Rahim