Re: [wg-b] .UNION Top-level domain name

["John Berryhill Ph.D. J.D." <john@johnberryhill.com>]

From: James Love <love@cptech.org>
To: John Berryhill Ph.D. J.D. <john@johnberryhill.com>

> a company or a product.  Thus, every union that represented workers at
> Boeing, worldwide, could have a link to boeing.union.  However, it does
> seem to me that this will be something for the unions to sort out.

And at delta.union will they be the faucet makers or the airline employees?
You cannot avoid the fact that as long as anyone is having anything to do
with strings of letters, there are going to be those who believe in "magic
words" as Prof. Mueller has called them.  Why the string of letters "union"
is inherently more of one thing than another thing to a non-English speaker
escapes me entirely.  And, no, I can't see how someone registering
"viagra.helps.your.sexual.union" should be any more "free speech"-y than
anything.com.

If the answer is to have delta.airline.union and delta.faucet.union , then
how is that any different from having a single unionsite.org , which could
be started in five minutes from now, and have:

boeing.unionsite.org
nike.unionsite.org
delta.faucet.unionsite.org

There are "narrow technical" answers to the "narrow technical" issues that
ICANN is intended to address.  Having more TLD's makes sense for technical
reasons.  More options, more namespace, etc.  Conditioning how and which
TLDs will or will not be made in view of political or legal considerations
has nothing to do with the "narrow technical" mission of ICANN.

There is no technical reason to have .union be treated any differently than
any other TLD proposal other than it is politically interesting or
attractive.  In terms of ICANN's function, the phrase "no technical reason"
equates to "no reason", because ICANN is not a political enterprise.  There
would have been additional TLDs by now had it not been for technically
irrelevant concerns having brought the process to a standstill.  It is time
to realize that ICANN is not a political body and for those with political
motivations to allow the technical process to follow its course.

John Berryhill, Ph.D. J.D.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania