News from the GNSO
A few major points from the PDP05 meeting in Amsterdam.
On the first half day there was a long discussion over the issue of
grants for applicants who may be prohibited from applying for a gTLD due
to the cost barrier. Overall there was a view that ICANN should cover
the initial costs of applying for those parties with potential less
ability to pay.
It was noted that some applications that come from areas of the Internet
community with potential less ability to pay, may also be more expensive
to evaluate due to different legal environments.
Whilst I acknowledge the need to recognise this, to my mind we are also
building in some major problems;
- who will decide the validity of each application that applies
for bid support?
- even though this is gTLD space, won't governments feel they
should be involved/influence any decisions on this , particularly as
ICANN is openly talking about bringing developing countries on stream?
- How do we stop the big boys forming shell companies and
playing the system etc
- Who will decide on the level of funding available and how
it's allocated?
In addition
- what about the cost of evaluation if the applications aren't
submitted in English (and I assume a large number of these subsidised
applications may be).
This requires a lot more thought before implementation
We also had discussions over applications that could be considered to
mimic other parts of the name space e.g. .labour and .jobs, or .comm and
.com. There was support for the view that a TLD string should not be
confusingly similar to an existing TLD string, but views on the
interpretation and control of this varied widely. There was a discussion
over ICANN attempting to establish a list of similar names for each
awarded registry contract to limit challenges, which seemed a dreadful
and unworkable idea to me, particularly as we move towards IDNs!
Where there are string conflicts two approaches were discussed the first
was where you could use a lottery or auction, the second was via some
form of evaluation process. Random selection was also discussed, the
difference when compared with a lottery is that those unsuccessful
wouldn't pay anything. It's also unclear whether a lottery approach has
legal aspects that haven't been exposed or clearly understood.
The intention is to complete the string conflict issue early on in the
process. Chuck Gomes was offering support for an approach that gave
additional weighting for applicants where there was 'community support',
which of course lends itself towards the sponsored TLD approach which is
against the earlier Registry position. Although this would only apply
where there was a conflict. The idea was also raised that an
arbitration/mediation process could be introduced that allow those
applicants in contention to resolve the issue via a dialogue between
them/ICANN. If one chose a different string as part of that process,
that application would still be part of that round of bids. For
sponsored TLDs their was clearly movement away from lottery's and
auctions, but that still leaves other types of gTLDs which some
Constituencies are arguing for.
Public policy issues remain a major concern, but few ideas on how to
tackle this were forthcoming, so the issues will be thrown to the GAC
with the starting question, "how do you plan to tackle this?"
A short discussion took place on the possible introduction of single
letter domains at both the first and second levels. The need for a
technical evaluation at the first level was recognised, as well as any
potential impact on IDNs. Their was support to consider insertion at the
top level as a separate part of the process.
Comments welcome.
Lots more work to do.
Regards
Tony
