On 28 January 2013 17:07, John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
In the case of Patagonia, that is a region and not a political entity name.
It, like Amazon, is also the name of a multinational commercial entity. It will be significant, at least to me, to see the history of objections launched against these domain names at the second level.
In ICANN's comments system, there's a huge pile of comments on .PATAGONIA. Many are in Spanish, which suggests they are from people who live in the area.
Agreed. One of the things that confounded me about the TLD process was that there seemed to be no concrete manner with which to handle the comments received. How are they to be evaluated and, if they constitute a legitimate community concern, how do they get escalated and collected? Certainly the ALAC and GAC objection processes have no link to the public comment area... is this the Independent Objector's responsibility? Or do the comments just sit there? And as for .health, I personally see it as no different from any other
non-brand dictionary word being applied for as a TLD. ...
There are four applications, all of which have a lot of comments. Is this about one in particular, or all four of them?
The comment received<http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/newgtldrg/attachments/20130125/469ed997/IMIArequesttoALAC-0001.pdf>objects to all of the current applications and asks for a moratorium on the delegation. It seems to suggest that only a suitably qualified NPO or the WHO should be entitled to run a TLD using this string. My take is that the public is sufficiently jaded by the existing naming structure that no simple name -- even a TLD -- will on its own engender any public trust. That needs to be earned. There is already such a broad history of drug companies using domain names connoting impartial health advice (ie whyinsulin.com), not to mention a whole industry of utter fakes. Only the most gullible are taken in anymore, and that can be solved through education. So I don' t really care who gets the prize. It is, after all, just a name. Given the nature of the industry-agreed TLD creation process, we need to operate under the reasonable premise than NO gTLD is being created in the public interest until proven otherwise -- either demonstrated over time, or by externally trusted certification / endorsement. I don' t care what happens to .bank, either. The URL of my current financial services provider serves me quite well under .com. - Evan