Glenn, Thanks for the thought provoking post. I've greatly enjoyed writing bits of a response over the past several days. The first note was written while minding children splashing about the beach on the north shore of Lake Huron. The second note was written in part in Wawa, and in part while again minding children splashing about the beach on the north shore of Lake Superior, as was the whole of the third note. It has been a very pleasant writing experience, off-line, with intermittent access when traveling by road. v4 exhaustion and the slow uptake of v6 point to futures of broken nets -- either due to carrier grade NATs, putting "smarts" back into the dumb network -- leading the connectionless network away from the end to end argument towards the connectionist (ITU) network model, or due to gateways essentially implementing the same scoping of address meaning -- leading the connectionless network away from the single address space (and hence single root) model towards an interconnect of national or regional networks model (see ITU, supra). The ITU's proposal to replace the working regional address registries may fail, I contributed a policy note to the U.S. Delegation to the ITU Meeting on IPv6 (Geneva), in March of 2010, making the case that transnational populations could be adversely affected by making v6 allocations only through national registries -- an example being the Rom population in Europe, and one or more European governments pursuing policies adverse to Roms and in violation of the Treaty of Europe and International Law. However, it is hard to keep a straight face and make the claim that the ITU must necessarily do worse at new gTLD policy making than ICANN has in the past year. If the ITU did exactly what ICANN did, adding only an equity of member state limit on identical business models, then ICANN's own diversity and inclusive goals would be better met than is currently the case -- where most of the approximately 2,000 identical business case applications are made by North American applicants using domestic or off-shore tax haven domiciles. The next three years, when the IANA Functions contract is up for competitive bid again, when more than one bidder can be expected, will be very, very challenging for ICANN as an institution, and for the continued existence of its "public interest" mission contained in both the Green and White Papers. Eric Brunner-Williams Candidate, NARALO ALAC Rep. election 2012