Re: [ga] Attn: GA Chairman Younger....

[Alexander Svensson <alexander@svensson.de>]

Dear Leah,

> The example used by Mr. Thornton was to illustrate the technical
> prohibition of having duplicate domains.  It was not a political or
> "rights" statement, although that much would follow through.

Yes, I understood and agree that duplicate TLDs are
harmful. There is a range of possible ways to deal
with that to avoid the sad story of the child and
the phone -- you could even forbid alternative roots
because the possible confusion is creating grave
security problems! No, I'm not proposing that; I
just questioned the logic that if I start a TLD
registry using all possible three-letter strings or
all words in a dictionary except the ones used by
ICANN and the other alt.roots, I can practically block
the whole TLD space just because I "came first".
I don't think this would be a good decision, and
secondly there is no entity which could make such a
binding decision for both ICANN and the alt.roots
except maybe the U.S. courts.

> As for rights in a TLD and who got there first, it is a fact of life in
> any free market.
I'm afraid this is the alt.roots' weak point. There is
no first-come-first-serve rule for TLDs -- the alt.roots
have no such protection. There are various strategies
for the alt.root registries to deal with this:

 -- Try to lobby U.S. Congress, e.g. by appearing
 at hearings or creating the TLDA to emphasize the
 business aspect of alt.roots. This is what you have
 tried, but I'm not too convinced this will work out.

 -- Try to get the U.S. courts to stop ICANN or DoC. So
 far, this has not worked out, and it seems the alt.roots
 have no TM rights in 'their' TLDs.

 -- Try to get a mass market for the alternative TLDs
 and hope for the "normative power of facts". I'm not sure
 how New.net will do when there finally are new TLDs that
 don't require any plug-in or change in the settings.

 -- Try to get into the ICANN/USG root by applying
 officially, like IODesign does.

<snip>
> It IS a single DNS - a single name space, and a serious issue.  If the
> GA has not shown a consensus, perhaps it is due to a lack of
> understanding of the issues.  It seems that the GA has dealt only
> with the web and needs to look at the Internet.  A working group is
> a beginning to gain understanding and develop a consensus, don't
> you think?

Learning more about technical and social effects of
TLD duplication can obviously do no harm. But in the
end, it is a policy question: Does ICANN want to
restrict itself to all the TLDs left over by the
alt.roots even though it is not legally required to?
Do the benefits of this restriction outweigh the
disadvantages? And the problem is that the answer to
this question depends largely on whether you
(a) operate an alt.root TLD or hold alt.root domains,
(b) operate or want to operate a TLD in the ICANN/
USG root. Therefore I'm rather skeptical about a
consensus on this policy question.

Best regards,
/// Alexander
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