I too am delighted to see that Danny's back. His concerns and comments are always thoughtful and detailed. And as I'm sure his proposal will attract a good deal of attention, I'm going to piggy-back on it and introduce a related issue. My attention is on imagining how a TLD could best serve the complex needs of a global city such as New York, with millions of residents and hundreds of thousands of employees - we have 8,200,000 residents and 302,000 city employees. To help address a portion of this question, I recently organized and moderated a City-TLD Governance and Best Practices workshop at the IGF Vilnius meeting, see report <http://www.coactivate.org/projects/campaign-for.nyc/vilnius-workshop-report>. In short, that report calls for defining criteria that identify a public interest city-TLD, undertaking global outreach to identify cities meeting those criteria, addressing cost issues - especially as they pertain to cities of lesser wealth, assigning dedicated ICANN staff for processing such city-TLDs, and creating a structure for city-TLD governance within ICANN and/or elsewhere as appropriate. I've copied the Draft Definition of a Public Interest City-TLD below and would appreciate your thoughts. But your thoughts on this Draft Definition is a secondary piggy-back. *What drove me to post here is the question of the longevity of a city-TLD* and the domain names it presents. So in the instance of New York City, how long is its TLD expected to serve the needs of city residents and organizations? As I don't see a reasonable substitute for the DNS on the horizon (thoughts on Kahn's Handle System are welcomed), we must be prudent and find ways to make the names last for generations to come, in essence looking upon the .nyc TLD as a limited resource in need of policies to assure its sustainability. We've created a Sustainable City-TLDs page on our wiki <http://www.coactivate.org/projects/campaign-for.nyc/sustainable-city-tlds> with a bit more on this topic, but it needs some help. I hope it's not too far afield from Danny's question and would appreciate your thoughts. Best, Tom Lowenhaupt ----------------------------------------------- Thomas Lowenhaupt, Founder & Chair Connecting.nyc Inc. tom@connectingnyc.org <mailto:tom@connectingnyc.org> Jackson Hts., NYC 11372 718 639 4222 Web <http://www.connectingnyc.org/> Wiki <http://www.coactivate.org/projects/campaign-for.nyc/project-home> Blog <http://www.coactivate.org/projects/campaign-for.nyc/blog/> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Draft Definition of Public Interest City-TLDs For Discussion, as of November 4, 2010 Cities are frequently ancient and always complex institutions that provide basic food, housing, health, safety, and cultural needs for more than half of humankind. They can best serve their residents and organizations if they have access to the most advanced technology. Until now cities have been prohibited from effectively using good Internet Domain Names, requiring residents and organizations to use national or global TLDs for local communication. The ICANN's 2008 new TLD policy opened the door for the issuance of city-TLDs. The development of city-TLDs as public interest resources will be transformational, providing cities with a Critical Internet Resource, and empowering them to develop their digital infrastructure to the direct benefit of residents and organizations. The utility of a list of cities seeking the development of public interest TLDs was expressed at the recent IGF Vilnius workshop on City-TLD Governance and Best Practices, where the ICANN's chair suggested that a cities list would facilitate ICANN's operation. The creation of a definition of a Public Interest City-TLD is a first step in developing such a list, with outreach to identify interested cities a next step. Definition: Public Interest city-TLDs are those which serve the long term interests of city residents and organizations. They serve those interests when: * they use the name-space to facilitate geographic awareness enabling residents and organizations to readily locate one another to optimize the exchange of services, products, and ideas and revivify the traditional networking role of cities; * they facilitate the availability of civic collaboration tools – calendars, maps, mail lists, polling, and other organizing tools – making them available for civic benefit on a public access basis; * they reserve and advocate for the use of domain names for unbiased portals for government, civic, and development use; * they commit a significant portion of their resources to eradicating digital divides by facilitating civic collaboration, education, and training; * they allocate names for the civic benefit of geographic sub areas (neighborhoods), civic activities, and public issue resolution; * they provide names in support of all ethnic populations; * they strive for name allocation practices that will maintain a flow of good domain names for the life of the TLD; * they establish allocation policies that avoid pitfalls such as hoarding and typo-squatting using pricing and nexus requirements. Additionally, public interest city-TLDs are those that: * are operated in close cooperation with the extant local institutions, to provide a secure experience suitable for residents, civic, cultural and business organizations, and visitors; * exchange experiences and best practices with other cities operating TLDs in the public interest; * operate within a broad "urbanismo" framework that considers their geographic, economic, political, social, and cultural impact on their environment; * commit to develop appropriate channels for inter-city sharing of vital Internet enabled city resources in areas such as education, health, safety, and sanitation; * commit to working in collaboration with relevant local and national public authorities; * commit to engaging all segments of the population in the management of their TLDs; * commit to the allocation of name spaces that promote sustainable cities; * commit to the use of graphic design practices that facilitate cross cultural understanding; * commit to support their city’s branding and external promotion activities; * commit to engage all segments of the population and the technical operators of the TLD in a collaborative governance structure. On 11/29/2010 11:52 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:

Hi Danny. Welcome back to NARALO.

I understand your points about the Russian registrrar reserving "premium" domains for themselves. I also agree that such action is against the public interest.

I have long been bothered about domain-name speculatuion -- about how domain hoarders inflate the cost of domains while adding ZERO value to the process. But I am personally less concerned about whether the speculator is a contracted party or a registrant than the general negative effect of domain speculation.

I'm certainly interested in working with you to advance this issue. But I have a couple of questions on this issue regarding my own confusion:

1. From the point of view of end-users, does it matter if the hoarder is a registry, registrar or domainer registrant? If so, why? When someone is (in the view of some) "shaken down" by a domain auction, does it matter to the buyer whether the domain speculator is a the creator of the domain, a reseller of it or another end-user?

2. I could personally understand the argument that registrars and registries have had to make investments and undertake risks to be able to provide domains, and as a result have added value to the Intrenet namespace. By contrast, an end-user registrant speculator creates no added value. Why should registrars and registries be held back from engaging in speculation if end-users are allowed to speculate?

3. Is the problem of scarcity one that can be fixed with a lot more TLDs? I mean, there's nothing holding a gun to anyone's head to buy domains at auction. If there are many more TLDs available, doesn't that reduce scarcity, icrease the risk to speculators and force the price down?

4. From the beginning ICANN has held, as a core principle, that domains are commodities first and identities second. To we want to reverse that? Is it too late?

5. Given that half of ICANN's policy-making body (the GNSO) is entities that make money by selling as mamy domains for as much money as possible, what is our realistic chance of advancing a policy change through that body that may significamtly reduce revenues?

- Evan

On 29 November 2010 22:09, Danny Younger<dannyyounger@yahoo.com> wrote:

...

Dear all,

Events that have transpired in the last few days attendant to the launch of .рф have made it clear to me that although we can't deal with the troubling issues that may arise with TLD launches in the ccTLD world, we do have the ability to act to protect the public interest within the gTLD sphere by way of a policy that would govern speculation in domain names by registrars.

By way of background, in the recent .рф ccTLD launch an ICANN accredited registrar, RU-Center, decided to register domain names in its own name on a priority basis and only then did it register other domain names. Approximately 24,500 premium domains registered to RU-Center were then put up for auction. The Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) then stepped in, shut down the auctions and accused a number of registrars of collusion.

What can we learn from this? Simply put... greed in the new TLD launch process can lead to abuse of the public trust, and measures need to be in place to ensure that the public is protected from the ICANN-accredited registrar community.

In our gTLD world, there is at the moment no ICANN policy whatsoever governing speculation in, or warehousing of, domains by registrars. Registrars are able to game the system to their own ends however they see fit; this has to change.

The current RAA (section 3.7.9) states: "Registrar shall abide by any ICANN adopted specifications or policies prohibiting or restricting warehousing of or speculation in domain names by registrars".

As there is no such policy or specification, I suggest that we initiate a PDP to have such a policy created, namely a policy that would state:

"No registrar, registrar affiliate, or reseller of registrar services shall engage in warehousing of or speculation in domain names."

While I understand that the GNSO soon will broadly be looking at proposed amendments for the RAA, we all know that the GNSO process (if spread over the entirety of the RAA proposed amendments) can take years to arrive at a recommendation... yet with the imminent roll-out of hundreds of new gTLDs, we just don't have the luxury of waiting that long.

In my view, what is called for is a Fast Track PDP approach that would focus on a single policy recommendation that could be put in place before any new gTLD is launched.

I would ask the NARALO to bring this matter to the immediate attention of the ALAC.

Thanks for your consideration of this issue.

Danny Younger

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On 30 November 2010 11:48, Bob Bruen <naralo@coldrain.net> wrote:

In my opinion, there is an inherent tension between any business and the public interest.

I'd say that it often exists, but this dynamic is not "inherent" beyond the tension involved in buyers wanting lowest-possible prices and sellers wanting highest-possible. If a transaction between business and consumer satisfies both, there is little tension.

In the case that Danny pointed out, the registrar has an unfair advantage, because they are the registrar. In a normal business situation, a business sells a good or service based on market pressures, which determines pricing. In a monopoly, the price is determined by the monopoly holder, clearly an unfair advantage and the reason why monopolies are controlled by governments.

Agreed so far. But the monopolies in domain space are purely artificial. Unlike real estate, the available namespace could increase massively overnight, if the floodgates for TLD applicants opened tomorrow. I would make barriers to creating a TLD lower than are being proposed. I really don't care who is doing the hoarding, whether it's registry, registrar or end-user domainer. To me, that's a turf war between rival gangs and I don't care who gets bloodied more when they fight. The end-user, and the registrants who actually want to put domains to use, are the only real targets of any "unfairness", and domainers are as much a part of the problem as any contracted party. I don't see domainers as any more or less ethical than registries or registrars; it's the hoarding itself that I oppose. IMO, the Internet domain should be subject to use-it-or-lose-it regulations, using concepts already applied globbally to that other identify-based concept of property, the trademark. If I had my own way, registrants would have a certain amount of time to provide original content under their domain or it would go back into the 'available' pool. (And by "original content" I don't mean that embarrassment of the Internet known as the "park page".) A domain with original content behind it could be resold but not one that was unused, went to a park page, or "under construction". I want to see lots more TLDs -- and if I had my way I'd have ICANN do a publicity campaign to promote the diversity of TLDs, and by inference get the public away from the notion that there's a "default" TLD that everyone should aspire to have. To me, this -- elimination the of TLD scarcity, combined with the reduction in fears against using a TLD that's not .COM or one's own CC -- is the best way to deal with domain hoarding. Drop the bottom out of the market and make speculation too risky for all but the most sure-thing sellers. If a registry and/or registrars conspire to create scarcity in a TLD, have enough alternative TLDs available so that nobody will be hurt by that one particular scarcity. And combine that with tough regulations on renewal behavior and pricing. Just my two cents with an admittedly minority stance. Maybe that publicity campaign is doable, at least. - Evan