Single Letter Reserved Names

[Avri Doria]

hi,

On 7 mar 2007, at 22.18, Milton Mueller wrote:

> No one except full time lobbyists can keep up with them all,

not to make a big deal of it, but i am keeping up with them as a
volunteer with my income coming from a totally different area of
endeavor (technical research).  true i am only on 2 of the subgroups
(the ones i volunteered for were controversial names and geographic
names)

also there has been a lot of outreach to get other constituency
participants involved in the process.  and as with Victoria, some
good people have gotten involved.

but it is a lot of work.


> and their composition seems unbalanced.

composition is volunteer.  that is one of the reasons i reached out
to this constituency earlier to get more of you involved.  though i
admit i was most concerened about controversial names in that instance.

> I have three questions:
> 2) Does anyone have the right to form one of these subgroups? e.g.,
> could Robin decide to create the "consistency of ICANN's TLD
> process with Article 19 Subgroup"?

the RN working group as a whole talked abut the subgroups that needed
to be formed.  there were based on the type of reserved names either
already represented in contracts or some of the issue that had been
brought up in documents like the GAC's draft.


> 3) Is the single-letter TLD auction solely for .com or are we
> talking about any registry?

it would be for any registry and there is no agreement yet on whether
there should be an auction.  I htink it is also an open question of
who should benefit from any auctions that might occur. some of us,
myself included, think that on some of the real rare commodities,
e.g. the single letters, that any auction the proceeds go to a fund
(probably external to ICANN) that can use them to support developing
countries and their efforts - either for capacity building or, my
hope, for actually funding applications since they will be too
expensive for a developing country based organization in most cases.


> 4) regarding ALT1, why is selling a second-level domain name a "new
> service?" what makes it different from selling any other domain name?
>

i guess if it is occurs under a different set of rules, e.g. auction
for the good of developing nations or something like that, it would
be a different service.

>>>> Danny Younger <dannyyounger at YAHOO.COM> 3/7/2007 6:00 PM >>>
>>>>
> The allocation recommendations from the Reserved Names
> Subgroup (otherwise known as the Business
> Constituency) have been released:

still just a draft that has not even been fully discussed by the
whole RN WWG yet.  the process:

- the sub group tries to come to some sort of consensus - if they
can't alternatives are offered.
- the RN wg tries to come up with a consensus based on the
recommendations off the sub-group.  if they can't then the report
includes alternate/minority positions.
- the report is sent on the the new gTLD committee of the whole where
they will discuss the recommendations and figure out what they want
to do with them.  at which point we are in the standard PDP process.

a.