On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 12:40 PM Alan Greenberg <greenberg.alan@gmail.com> wrote:

I have never been one of the "Let a thousand flowers bloom" proponents. It was a foundational concept within ICANN and it obviously still is.

What it is, is a foundational flaw. In what ICANN calls "multistakeholder", some stakeholders -- the vested interests who seek to extract value from the DNS -- get to impose their will on the others.

It's baked into the system. Two specific communities -- the providers and renters of domains -- have the ability to compel the Board (via the GNSO) to do their bidding over the wishes of governments and the public interest who can only advise. In most other fields of regulation it's the exact opposite; governments and the public set policy while industry advises but cannot compel. That absolutely nobody else has adopted ICANN's model for governance elsewhere clearly indicates that it hasn't lived up to expectations and isn't suitable for use elsewhere.

It is also clear that because of this power imbalance, the Internet world had generally bypassed ICANN's chosen methods and followed standards set by groups that better reflect the public interest. There are numerous commercial and noncommercial entities that have served the public better than ICANN ever could hope to do. You've even offered a number of excellent examples:

- IDNs

An utter joke; the world has left punycode behind. People everywhere can use search engines, commercial and non-commercial, to find what they want on the Internet using Unicode and its support of more than 170 scripts.

ICANN has already recognized the futility of its wheel-reinvention, giving up on the "universal acceptance" begging campaign when it cut off UASG funding last year. Community participants who seriously care about improving global access to the Internet, whether physical or cultural, seriously need to look at other vehicles besides ICANN to accomplish this. UNESCO and ISOC are good places to start.

- Community TLDs

This has always been a headache for ICANN, and it's an increasingly pointless one as alternatives develop. Such is the pervasive culture of exploitation, that well-meaning programs such as Applicant Support must erect so many barriers against abuse that they render themselves useless for their intended purpose. And based on Tijani's comments in this thread, not much appears to have changed in this regard since I left ALAC.

The ICANN community has always operated under a number of unstated and undeserved conceits. Among them is that having a domain can bestow an identity or cohesion that did not previously exist. Another is that it is reasonable to extract a monthly rental fee from communities (and their members) simply to maintain this identity. These days communities now have access to wonderful tools such as Mastodon, Discord and Reddit for bringing together common interests; they support subgroups, virtual events and real-time communications. More importantly they are free to use, in sharp contrast to the domain world's demand of monthly rent.

In this environment in which so many options exist for community building and development that are both cheaper and more effective, ALAC's efforts are not looking out for the best interests of communities. They are looking out for the best interests of domain landlords who want to extract value from communities.

- Underserved areas

See above. Another conceit is that "underserved by memorable domain names" has any relation to "underserved by the Internet". Again, the net effect of ALAC's contributions here is to find ways to have the "underserved" pay for domains when less-costly, more-effective paths to Internet access exist.  Again, this is not looking out for the best interests of the underserved, but rather for the industry that wants to find and rent domains to them.

"When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". Getting domains is not always the most effective answer to challenges of access or development; please stop acting as if it is. I await the first instance in which ALAC defines a use case in which better solutions exist to an access problem than getting a unique domain. 

- Evan

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