If I may just suggest a friendly thought-amendment (it doesn't rise to amendment of text): On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 07:31:46PM -0400, Greg Shatan wrote:
need to find (or create) instead is a valid *representative* group (or
I think we don't actually need a _representative_ group as such, because that tends to open important and legitimate questions about how we are sure that the group accurately represents the (relevant) population generally. Instead, it really ought to be a group that gives voice to a spectrum view and attempts to express a set of interests. Those interests are not necessarily _represented_, but they must be reflected somehow in the positions the group takes. In this case, it is the "names community", which is all the people whose interests and concerns are affected by decisions about the IANA names registries and how those interact with the relevant IPR. (To draw an analogy, the IETF is certainly not a "representative" group of Internet protocol parameter users, since it's pretty obvious to anyone who has met an IETFer that we're a very poor cross-section of all Internet users. Have you seen our habits of dress? And since everyone who has ever used Internet ports 80 or 443 -- i.e. approximately everyone on the Internet is affected -- is implicated in protocol parameters, there must be something else at stake.) I'm not sure how to express that, but the point is that the concerned operational community -- the people who attend to these issues at the top-most policy layers of the domain name system -- have themselves an interest in making sure that the overall name system remains robust and viable precisely because their own (enlightened self-) interests depend on that overall system viability. I don't know whether that helps, but it seems to me to align with the overall idea that the "names operational community" that comes together through ICANN processes must look out for the good of the name system, or the name system will itself fail and be supplanted by something else. I hope that is useful, even if rather vague. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com