Dear Jeff, You wrote: All of that said, here is my proposal: We keep the No Agreement section in the report as we have now and put it out for public comment. We explain in the section that we are going to take into consideration comments received and try once more to see if there is way to figure out a mechanism to measure whether a generic closed TLD can serve a public interest goal during the (and after) the draft final report public comment period. I think we ought to clarify first whether or not closed generic gTLDs are bound to serve a public interest goal by the new gTLD program. If that was never clarified: then the GNSO has to do it now (not we in this WG - but by consensus of the stakeholders). I guess once we have answered that fundamental question this WG might easily come up with suggestions: and we can ask the community to weigh in on them. By simply stating that we have not been able to come up with policy advice: what do you expect the community to do? They find a magical solution? It will be the same all over: some assert that there is no public interest goal, others do. At bar minimum it must be clarified whether the GNSO stakeholders see the introduction of closed generic gTLDs as being bound to serve a public interest goal. Thanks, Alexander From: Gnso-newgtld-wg <gnso-newgtld-wg-bounces@icann.org <mailto:gnso-newgtld-wg-bounces@icann.org> > On Behalf Of George Sadowsky Sent: Monday, July 13, 2020 12:32 PM To: gnso-newgtld-wg@icann.org <mailto:gnso-newgtld-wg@icann.org> Subject: [Gnso-newgtld-wg] A few additions to yesterday's post re a different approach to public interest closed generic strings. All, I'd like to add one more criterion for comfort in chartering public interest closed generic string domains: "7. Registration fees and revenue in general should be set at a level to cover costs and provide a reasonable rate of return for the administration of the domain. Should assets build up over time for an unrelated reason, it should be required that they be periodically withdrawn and dedicated to an external effort in a manner related to the public interest objective for which the collective management of the domain enjoys rough consensus." More important, reflecting on my post of yesterday, it occurred to me that there were some general principles behind the detail that might be worth abstracting as guidelines for how we might think about setting ground rules for structuring closed generic domains to obtain the conduct of participants and effectiveness of behavior in the public interest that we might want to see. I suggest the following (again a rough approximation of what could be possible): A. The initial applicants for such a domain should all come from a base of organizations already involved in action with regard to the public interest issue to be addressed by the domain's name and purpose, and should constitute a large enough representative subset of that gro p to skeak with some authority about the substance, importance, and legitimacy of the issue. B. The financial arrangements governing the operation of the domain should provide a reasonable operational return to t he activities of the domain and should preclude any windfall gains to the organization. Rationale: This should serve to cater to the public service aspects of the activity rather than any significant financial gain. C. The rules governing the development of the domain should encourage competition among registrants to provide the best, most relevant and most useful information and services for beneficiaries who access information from the site. Competition should be directed to the area of substantive content and not to competitive structure or direct financial profit. Rationale: The primary purpose of the domain will be the substantive content that it provides. Competition among organizations is inevitable, so let's create a structure that focuses that competition on what's most important for the user: helpful and useful content. Is this too draconian? If the resulting domain is truly to be a public interest web site, then the incentive for organizations in creating one should be more in the centralization and enlargement of a more useful and more visible collection of helpful information, not hopes for large financial gain. George ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ George Sadowsky Residence tel: +1.301.968.4325 8300 Burdette Road, Apt B-472 Mobile: +1.202.415.1933 Bethesda MD 20817-2831 USA Skype: sadowsky george.sadowsky@gmail.com <mailto:george.sadowsky@gmail.com> http://www.georgesadowsky.org/