New gTLDs policy development process -- comments and edits

[KathrynKL at AOL.COM]

Milton:
Great, glad the comments made sense.  Mawaki, I think you will be  taking our
full range of comments and making them into a final report, is that  right?
Thank you!

The reason we send multiple people to ICANN conferences is so that we can
talk and listen to the widest discussions possible.  There were people at  the
last ICANN conference specifically sent by their companies to pursue single
letter top level domains.  The strategy they and the Business Constituency  will
be pursuing (I am led to believe) is that only the sponsored and
"super-sponsored domain names" should be allowed, not the general opening up of  general
gTLDs.  On the one hand, they will want .AOL (just an example, I  have not
seen the AOL people at ICANN); on the other hand, they don't want a  .WEB or
.OPEN because it will conflict with their trademarks.

So the strategy for us, I think, is to make it very clear to them that we
will block theirs until they let us have ours.  Open up the whole gTLD  system
(as you, Milton, propose) and all will be well.  Open up only little  corners
for the biggest companies in the world, and we will oppose.

That's my thought and proposal for NCUC.

As for the preamble, the deletion was inadvertent.  It is good. I like  the
idea of making it an appendix, or better, a "concluding NCUC note."   Regards,
Kathy

>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



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