I think that the .HEALTH registry will have an uphill battle to gain, let alone maintain, public trust. There are so many fuzzy obstacles. Consider: - There is a wide and deep marketplace of materials that are marketed as "health" related that may be not approved by national regulatory bodies, yet perfectly legal to sell. Or they may be legal in some countries, illegal in others, and regulated in others. Into this category I would put herbal remedies (consider Chinese medicine, which has very little reliance on western pharma), experimental drugs, dietary supplements, and non-medicinal health aids such as copper bracelets. In some cases, the sale of the materials may be legal everywhere but the marketing claims (and attached disclaimers) must vary from country to country. Is all THAT going to be policed? - Then we have the well-known-to-ICANN issues of intellectual property. While in most ICANN realms the main issue is trademark, in .HEALTH there will also be issues of patents to deal with. While many people lump them together, the legal regimes for patents are completely different from those of copyrights and trademarks. - The Internet has enabled intercontinental trade in a manner that laws and regulations strain to match. Assurances of checking for companies that "operate in" various countries only goes so far. DHL and UPS (not to mention Hongkong Post etc) don't act as customs regulators and will convey anything not dangerous to carry or globally illegal. A vendor of health remedies who will ship goods anywhere -- what body is going to police which countries are OK to ship to and which are not? Will the police of .HEALTH be able to track every link from its domains which go outside the HEALTH registry (ie, to eBay, Alibaba, etc) to actually complete sale at an e-commerce site? Is such policing within scope? - We have a very innovative marketplace when it comes to evading the letter of regulation. I potentially foresee an industry that will quickly find out how monitoring like LegitScript works, then invent ways to work around it. Then the monitors will no doubt come up with remedies, just as reliably new subversion methods emerge, and the cycle starts anew. (Think of how online casinos "discovered" how to use .net...) - If (as I suspect) .HEALTH becomes dominated by (a) legal-but-untested/unregulated products/services and (b) companies that find ways around the registry rules, big pharma will be in no rush to abandon its existing (and trusted) space in .com (or ccTLDs) to be there too. Would a company that has invested huge R&D and testing budgets want to have its products share the same namespace as "alternative medicine"? Maybe there are ways around all this. But it won't be easy. While, as in other new gTLDs, there will be speculators and defensive registries and maybe an interesting use or two, I don't really see much public-interest benefit of .HEALTH (or, for that matter, most of the new TLDs either). The rejection (so far) of Policy Advisory Councils by ICANN -- as ALAC has proposed -- has not helped matters from a public-interest PoV. -- Evan Leibovitch Toronto Canada Em: evan at telly dot org Sk: evanleibovitch Tw: el56