A request for action

[Carlos Afonso]

Grande Horacio,

I write under the impact of the very sad news that Chris Nicol, an APC 
pioneer and friend, has died after a long, brutal illness. Why so much 
suffering to end such a wonderful, precious life?

My opinion is that the current process needs to be radically reviewed, 
dissociating it entirely from the piecemeal "business brokerage" 
function ICANN is dedicated to (which consumes most of its energies and 
money).

However, is this possible? No in the current state of affairs within ICANN.

There is no need for new commercial TLDs (certainly not g, and mostly 
not s either, since in practice there is no difference in several cases) 
-- this only fulfills business interests to make sure someone gets a 
quick break-even business and ICANN gets a little more money. If anyone 
can argue there is a need for a truly non-commercial sTLD  and this is a 
viable thing to establish within the current ICANN environment, let us 
see if this is truly viable and possibly support it.

This, however, given the business orientation dominant from the 
inception of ICANN on this issue (let us recall the whole thing was born 
from a white paper on e-commerce...), is in my view not possible in the 
current environment.

So, my view: either no domains should be created, or, better, let us 
"convince" ICANN to establish a moratorium on the creation of any TLD 
and insist on the creation of a multistakeholder working group a la 
WGIG, and establish the proper criteria for new TLD labels which truly 
take into account the global nature of the network, as g/sTLDs are no 
longer just generic domains or a thing of the USA, but in practice are 
global domains belonging to the worldwide community of Internet-related 
stakeholders.

As to the technical claims it might not be workable to establish dozens 
or hundreds of additional TLDs, this is not really an honest claim, as 
DNS server software today runs with DBMS backends, router memory 
capacity is orders of magnitude above what it was a few years ago, 
bandwidth and processing power ditto. If DNS today handles about 300 
TLDs, what is the real difference in making it handle, say, 500, even 
with the additional DNSSec workload?

In summary, the question is not technical -- it is just the classical 
case of artificially generating scarcity to increase the value of the 
commodity.

If a sizable amount of new domains are activated, created after careful, 
transparent, democratic and pluralist discussion (authoritative and 
independent from ICANN) is carried out, my dream might come true -- the 
end of a commodity called g/sTLD, as prices will drop so much that the 
business will become irrelevant and we might have the opportunity to 
claim them back to the commons where they should belong from the very 
beginning.

abraço fraterno

--c.a.


Horacio T. Cadiz wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Aug 2005, Carlos Afonso wrote:
>
>> Not only that. I insist on the view that new gTLDs (or sTLDs) are 
>> approved just for the purpose of making more money and thus 
>> generating more income to ICANN. A sufficient number of major 
>> second-level domain owners will purchase 
>> <whatever_secondary_domain>.<any_xyz_topTLD> in order to preserve
>
>
>   Como estas Carlos?
>
>   Are you then of the opinion that there should be a stop to the 
> creation of new gTLDs?
>
>
> -- 
> *****************************************************************
> * Horacio T. Cadiz |Philippine Network Foundation, Inc (PHNET)  *
> * ------------------------------------------------------------- *
> * Free/Open Source Software. No Gates. No Windows. It is Open.  *
> * No Bill. It is Free.                                          *
> *****************************************************************
>
> .
>

-- 
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Carlos Afonso
diretor de planejamento
Rede de Informações para o Terceiro Setor - Rits
Rua Guilhermina Guinle, 272, 6º andar - Botafogo
Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brasil         CEP 22270-060
tel +55-21-2527-5494        fax +55-21-2527-5460
ca at rits.org.br            http://www.rits.org.br
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