On Mar 24, 2008, at 8:29 AM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
I would not stand in the way of formation of a constituency of individual registrars. However, creation of this group should not -- must not, IMO -- prevent the proper representation within GNSO of Internet consumers. The need for one does not deny the need for the other, and I for one do not believe any attempt should be made to lump the two together.
Broadly speaking, I see three distinct groups - contracted parties (registrants, registrars and registries), domain name users (commercial, non-commercial and individual) and infrastructure service providers (software developers, telecoms, etc.) Within each of the subsets, further segmentation of the stakeholder groups is probably necessary - i.e. sponsored TLD registries, generic TLD registries, commercial registrants, individual registrants and so on... I don't think the GNSO can ever be all that functional unless there is a material way for each of these groups to meaningfully participate in the work of the GNSO. I've always found it to be useful to think of any changes to the structure of the GNSO in terms of what the long-term picture should look like. It would be great if the community could agree on a roadmap that would help us guide our short-term efforts. -ross