Dear Hong Xue, Patrick, as you know I fully share your concerns and defeated last year an attempt to control IDNccTLD allocation permitting this kind of absurd behavior. Yet, this did not made them to change tack. However, I would really be interested if you could (or anyone else) quote a text making possible a different ICANN strategy. (1) the higher the price the more the buyer will defend the seller's strategy. Obviously ICANN prefer to make friend with large corporations rather than with a few @larges who have no BoD vote. (2) As far as I recall ICANN is to "foster competition" in the domain name area. NTIA says they do not enough. However, - ICANN was not to be a Registry (I do not know if this is still in the ByLaws) - competition at Golden TLD level can only be carried by (a) Competitive Root(s) - it/them being capitalistic, nationalistic, people centric? jfc At 00:03 10/08/2008, Hong Xue wrote:

Thanks for drawing our attention on this paper. Given that the new gTLD process embraces the IDN TLDs, the paper presents a very surprising, or shocking view, on allocation of TLDs. If the paper is primarily on the economic consideration, I wonder if the ICANN has any other consideration, such as protecting cultural diversity and bridging digital divide, on selection of new gTLDs (IDN gTLDs). As a governing body of a critical Internet resources, ICANN should envisage the values that are more important and fundamental than the highest bidding amount. I echo what has been precisely stated by Vittorio:

Another wrong assumption is that monetary value is the only quantity that counts.In fact, personally I think that the "value" of a TLD is mostly connected to other factors. For example, one is how many final users of the Internet will ever use services located inside that TLD; another one is how strongly these people will feel attached to that TLD, i.e. whether the TLD contributes to build any kind of "community identity" for an online group of people that presently does not have it; a third one is whether the new TLD will spawn innovative uses of the DNS or enable innovative services. None of these is directly connected to monetary value, and it is quite disturbing to me that an organization like ICANN, which is meant to steward scarce global public resources in the interest of the entire community of the Internet, still seems to have such a partial and narrow view of where the value of the Internet itself lies. Hong

On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 11:14 PM, Patrick Vande Walle <patrick@vande-walle.eu

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wrote:

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http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-08aug08-en.htm

ICANN has published a paper from its contractor PowerAuctions LLC, regarding the use of auctions to award new TLD strings in case of contention.

http://icann.org/en/topics/economic-case-auctions-08aug08-en.pdf

I think it would be important that the At Large speaks up. The model proposed in the document is a purely capitalistic one. It is based on the assumption that all gTLDs are created to make as much money as possible. Smaller, community based TLDs seem quite difficult to launch in such context.

The mere possibility of auctions will actually generate contention on some strings. The little guys wishing to establish a not-for-profit TLD will be outplayed by the wealthy ones.

A public forum has been established at http://forum.icann.org/lists/auction-consultation/. Comments to auction-consultation@icann.org before 8 September 2008.

-- Patrick Vande Walle

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