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