On 03/17/2011 11:43 AM, Neil Schwartzman wrote:
The .xxx proposal strikes me as nothing more than a cash-grab to milk money out of <X>
I inserted <X> because pretty much every enterprise - from Google to United Airlines to Pet Rocks to Pets.com is "a cash-grab to milk money out of <X>". If people who are being asked to buy .xxx names do, as they voluntarily may do, not buy names in .xxx then .xxx will fail. Normal economic forces are adequate here; we do not net YARA - Yet Another Regulatory Agency - to be our overlord and master, or our nanny. The authority that people are investing into ICANN to give it the power to refuse .xxx is an authority that is dangerous. ICANN is already a dog being wagged by the intellectual property protection industry, the registry industry (particularly Verisign), government bureaucrats to extend their powers into realms that they do not constitutionally possess, etc. Isn't it time to defang that dog; to turn ICANN from a rabid pit bull, willing to bite anything its masters don't like, into a stuffed fuzzy toy that does exactly one thing - assure the technical stability of the internet domain name system? ICANN's one and only job in the domain name space ought to be to assure that at the root level of DNS that domain name query packets are efficiently, accurately, and reliably turned into domain name reply packets without bias against any query client or query question. --karl--