Re: [ga] new WG on chartered/sponsored TLDs

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Incidentally, you shouldn't cross-post...

On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 03:23:24PM -0800, Rick H Wesson wrote:
> Kent,
> 
> you are proposing almost what wg-c is supposed to do but altering your
> charter a bit. Why create a new working group, your proposal only shoots
> holes in wg-c, why not help work on some of the parrellel issues that you
> have in your charter in wg-c?

See the WG-C charter, at 
http://www.dnso.org/dnso/notes/19990625.NCwgc.html. 

It is explicitly tied to generic TLDs, not any other kind of TLDs.

> your charter ass-u-me-s that charters are a good thing, I believe wg-c has
> the carter to determine if charters should be used at all,

In my opinion, supported by the actual text of the WG-C charter, your
belief is incorrect.  Not only is it incorrect, but what you propose is,
in my opinion, a demonstrated bad idea.  WG-C is having *enough* trouble
coming to any conclusions about gTLDs, let alone take a several month
excursion into legal ramifications of charters. 

> why not find
> out first if there is consensus on charters, a great place to ask about
> charters if to poll all the current ICANN approved registrars, after all
> the register constituency whould have to pass muster on any DNSO doument.
> 
> I have worked with nearly half of the operational ICANN approved registers
> in consulting on operation issues, I suspect registrars would shoot down
> any type of chartered TLD.

Perhaps we should explore the issues before we ass-u-me what the 
registrars will decide, eh?  ;-)

> I suspect you are just tired of dealing with the off topic posts in wg-c
> and would prefer to get some work done on a narrowly focused topic.

I would definitely like to focus on a more narrow topic.  Moreover,   

> I believe the wg-c chair posted some fairly focused work items for the
> group, why not start there?

In my opinion WG-C is largely a failure, and is doomed to remain a
failure.  I think we should close it as gracefully as possible, and get
on with things.  All we have gotten out of it is a hotly contested
"consensus" that we should have new gTLDs.  Precisely zero progress has
been made on anything else -- instead there has been a continual rehash
of the same issues that have been discussed for the past three years. 
We don't even have a common set of terms. 

A much better approach to WG-C, in my opinion, would have been for us to
start with a document that described options, instead of positions -- a
descriptive document that defined the common terms of reference, or a
reference model detailing different possible structures for the
ICANN-registry-registrar relationship.  That didn't happen. 

To be more precise about the problem, when Chris Ambler talks about a
"Registry" he actually means something totally different from what the
CORE documents refer to as a "registry".  These underlying differences
in meaning terribly complicate the communications problem -- 50% of our
energy in WG-C has been spent in people talking past each other; the
other 50% is just disagreement.  It would have taken real work to
describe all the possible models for what a "registry" could be, but
ittle work gets done in WG-C -- mostly we shout at each other until we
take a vote, and then we argue about the result. 

So yes, I am frustrated with what goes on in WG-C :-)

I don't mean this as a criticism of Jon -- though there certainly are
things I wish he would have done differently.  I think that hindsight
shows us that WG-C was poorly chartered.  It has an awkward,
inappropriate, grandiose chunk of work for a work group.  The job should
be divided up in a different way. 

That's what I am trying to do.  In general I think we would make much 
more progress if we split work into smaller chunks...

Kent

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Do good, and you'll be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain
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