Thanks George for keeping the dialogue going and I think this is very helpful.

So, I presented an example before (and in) the initial report that I came up with.  The example was an application for .disaster by the International Red Cross.  The application (made up by me) was to have second level names given to specific disasters to serve as the official Red Cross fund raiser for these events.  Examples include HurricaineMaria.disaster, covid19VA.disaster, covid19UK.disaster, etc.  Users would know that if they went to these sites and donated, that the money would actually be going to the official Red Cross and to official sources.   The goal would be to drastically reduce the amount of fraud to end users from fake fundraising campaigns.

Those that opposed closed generics did not agree that this would be good enough.  They argued that generic words should be open to all “competitors” and why should the Red Cross monopolize a word/string.  They come from the very traditional view that second level domains should be available to all (with restrictions).  It is a view of end users being the registrants of domains as opposed to end users being those that use the Internet in general.   Opponents argued “why couldn’t they just apply for .redcross” or “why cant they just make it open”?  So essentially it became a debate about words and generic ness and who has a right to them as opposed to looking at the application itself to see if it served a public interest goal.  

When it became apparent that even in this humanitarian extreme example that members of the working group were unwilling to consider the application that we decided to end the discussion because it was clear that no example would satisfy the “serving a public interest goal” to members of the group.

I hope that helps explain a little bit more how we got here and that we have indeed tried to discuss some examples.