Wendy Seltzer ha scritto:

Suggested statement, the top part of which garnered approval on at least one of our numerous lists.

Ok, I thought we wanted something longer than this, but it'd be better than nothing.

ICANN should not be in the business of evaluating strings, period. It should publish technical criteria and minimally evaluate whether a registry fulfills those.

Are we sure that the criteria should be only technical? I don't buy the argument about the healing touch of the free market. I think that there should be criteria and that they should be liberal rather than restrictive, based on "we approve it unless it does more harm than good". But I don't think that, say, if someone applies for ".sucks", you should approve it only based on technical considerations - what if it had a policy that only trademark owners could register under it, so only Microsoft could have microsoft.sucks and any variation of it? Is that what you'd want from such a TLD? I think that ICANN has to check the registration policies of new TLDs.

Since all indications are that .xxx fulfils any technical criteria that ICANN has established, ICANN should promptly approve that agreement.

I would suggest replacing "since all indications are that" with "if", as we didn't do the evaluation and we're not entitled to do it. I would also strike "technical", as the criteria that ICANN established for this gTLD round are (AFAIK) not only technical. (I've not made my mind up on whether .xxx should be approved; until now, it seems to me that it'd do little good and some harm, so the only reason for approving it would be to prove the point that we need to be liberal on this matter, even if this means harming ourselves with our liberality. On the other hand, I'm not too comfortable in approving anything, generally speaking, as long as you can't manage to address the opposition of those who are not convinced yet, especially if this includes countries like Brazil and Sweden, and even the supposed users of this new TLD, ie adult webmasters. If the intended users don't want it, then the only possible use of the new TLD would be letting ICM to make money with defensive registrations - what for?)

Further, it should promptly open a process for applications for new unsponsored gTLDs.

Shouldn't it finally agree on a set of criteria and an ongoing process first? (BTW, it seems that ICANN is stuck waiting for the GNSO to finish its PDP on the matter, so the ball is not really in the Board's playing field at the moment.) -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------