FW: [ncsg-policy] Draft NCSG comments to GNSO Council on Rec 6

[Nicolas Adam]

My .02 would be:
why bend over backwards to find generalizable reasons to object to
obviously inesthetical tlds, when we can just watch them wither and die.
I am not of the hardcore libertarian tradition, but i believe that more
speech is always the prefered solution by contrast to less speech. I'm
from Canada (french part) where we love to point out the many flaws and
contradictions of US-style libertarian fear of governments and
bureaucracies, but the first amendment isn't one of those flaws or
contradictions. I would say, "let a thousand flower bloom".

And, as Jon Postel once said, "this is a naming system, not a general
directory assistance system". So, like Ron explicated, there is
absolutely no need to behave under a domain in such a way as to respect
necessary and sufficient conditions for semantic equivalence (or
non-contradiction) with the stated meaning of the string.

In any case, under the financial conditions of new gTLD applications,
gunning for a .peadophile TLD might not be all that rationnal. I'm
guessing that the high price tag on new gTLD application is protection
enough for obviously inesthetical or frivolous TLD registration (am I
already contradicted by experience?).

Obviously, i can see that we could want to "give-a-little" on such
issues to the GAC if they are sleepless about it and, in turn, are
menacing some other area of import to us (i have no example, and am
merely speaking in the abstract). Conversely, they must always be on the
lookout to expand their reach, so from this perspective, then we are
obviously at odds with them ...

Andrew, how does internationalisation mix in? phishing attempt by way
of, say, cyrillic caracaters? Then i guess i would support objections
based on "confusing similarity" with another tld.

Nicolas


> I'm persuaded by your argument that any tld string
> could be used in many ways but further consideration needs to be given to
> what this means in practice. Having been persuaded by Ron that .paedophilia
> or .paedophile even should not be considered beyond the pale as a string,
> should then ICANN attempt to exert any a-priori control over the issue on a
> semantic level or should it only ever work on the syntactic/technical level.
> This seems to me to be at the heart of many of the debates we're going
> through at the moment, and it would help to have a discussion in NCSG-NCUC
> about where we generally stand on this issue.
>
> Related issues that I think come up on this are (not exhaustively):
>
> new TLDs
> trademarks and dispute resolution
> country codes
> internationalisation