Vittorio and all, Your essentially correct, Vittorio IMO. The real problem is in your example of .CAT, that it is already in use. So, first use in commerce would apply under the law. As for .XXX, or for that matter any other "String" as a gTLD, or even a IDN gTLD is that national laws as to use would likely apply. If for instance, .XXX's specifically forbid sexual related registrations of DN's in that name space, I can't see how it would than be a problem per se. However as ICANN's oversight has been poor of it's Registries and Registrars, the problems of accountability and legal liability become the issue. Yet I don't see how any of this has much to do with whether or not auctioning gTLD's is a good implementation method or not. But still all of this still points back to the beginning. Self regulation simply doesn't work. Oversight is necessary. The more the better, and the better that oversight is, the better the "Greater Good" can and will be served. Vittorio Bertola wrote:

Bret Fausett ha scritto:

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On Aug 10, 2008, at 2:20 PM, Alan Greenberg wrote:

...

Using an auction to resolve the conflict does indeed mean that .web will not likely go to a small not-for-profit organization. If that is your concern, then in my mind, you are being somewhat unrealistic.

I was on the Council when this first came up, and the concern I heard from the ALAC then was about regionalism, rather than "non-profits" v. "for profits." I don't know that we care which among many U.S. corporate entities wins the battle for the next big ASCII TLD gold mine.

The ALAC concern, as I understood it, was about whether a foreign registry services provider ought to win the bid for the IDN versions of COM/NET/ORG over a competitor in the region in which the language is spoken. At bottom, it's a debate about free trade v. regional protectionism, a subject on which the nations of the world have significantly different positions.

Another case is when the two competing bids have completely different purposes and "social value". I.e. what happens if Catalonia applies for .cat to serve its 7-million Catalan speakers, but at the same time Caterpillar does the same and puts more money on the table, only to use the TLD for a nicer URL for their one corporate website?

If I remember well, the last versions of the process presented in Paris said that auctions would only be used if all applicants were "non-community", ie generic, while if at least one was a community applicant then they would have used a beauty contest. But I'm not sure whether this is still the intention.

I already said when .xxx was on the table that IMHO there is no way that you can get out of this mess without making subjective political judgements on who "deserves better", or whether a string is "against public policy", etc. In the end, I just hope that these decisions will be taken by an accountable political entity (e.g. the Board) rather than by an unaccountable "expert panel", disguised as if they could be objective. -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------

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