New gTLDs policy development process -- comments and edits

[Milton Mueller]

Kathy:
Thanks for your contribution! I agree with most of your edits, but have a couple of disagreements and factual corrections, below.

>>> <KathrynKL at AOL.COM> 1/25/2006 11:41 AM >>>
>We should warn the GNSO Council about [snip] the new push from 
>them to allow only "one-company" top level domains --
> .DISNEY and .O (Overstock.com) are being discussed.  

On .O, I think you are incorrect, Overstock wants "o.com," not .o as a TLD. I know of no initiative to add one-letter TLDs.

On .disney, I see nothing wrong with a company-specific TLD per se. In fact, I think it could be a progressive step forward, further decentralizing power over DNS, and making it clear to big companies that if they want domain names to be controlled in a specific way they can get their own domains and run them that way instead of trying to regulate the way the rest of us use DNS.  Aside from that, why should policy mandate that a company such as .aol, which has 10 million email addresses, must be dependent on an external registry (.com) for such a fundametnal part of their service? Why shouldn't they be allowed to self-provision?

>(so let's delete the paragraphs about ccTLDs).

You're absolutely correct about this! 

One other point: you (perhaps correctly) eliminated the preamble about our prior policy votes on this. While I agree that it reads smoother without that, and that it appears to conform better to the request for comments, I also think it is very important to remind everyone, as often as possible, that this debate has been going on for years, and that almost every time we consider it the majority view is that there should be some new TLDs. Perhaps we could add an appendix to that effect?