I didn't vote, and am not in your list, probably for the sin of levity.
In brief response: ICANN should take its time to structure a response that the market can understand and will take to be a reliable signal From the question, we would prefer the planning of option B and the caution of option A. It depends whether you want the scarcity value of a tight namespace or the freedom of multiple TLDs, of course.
The following might be tangentially useful in your discussions, although its is based on a smaller amount of data than we would like at the moment.
Josmarian had a plan to contact a number (100) of large, geographically contiguous company corporate legal departments to ask effectively your question, amongst others, on the grounds this was more interesting than introspection. This actually began in May, so before this group posed the questions, I think.
It is incomplete, as only about 50% of the ones we got to appeared to make sense of the question, of those 90% appeared to have had dinner with Chuck Gomes or Don Telage the previous week in terms of their information sources. Only Rolls-Royce lectured on how to confuse people in this area.
What, in our opinion, is underestimated by the internet 'purists' and technologists is the power and value of recognition/branding in the eyes of corporate managers and therefore the likely amounts that would be spent in defence of a perceived possession..
NSI provided simple, highly effective branding of the namespace for these people at a level that was easy to explain to senior management, easy to implement and understand. At this level the corporates don't want complex expansion of the namespace. Global .com was great when it appeared that this might escape the complex individual requirements of national company law etc (.plc.uk/ .tm.fr etc) and the need to have individual ccTLDs on a country basis for the multinationals.
Be very chary of complexity in this area. Of the IAHC/CORE gTLDs only
a couple had real attraction, it was more the technologists promoting
the scheme than individuals or corporates wanting the individual
suffix (I exclude .sex and similar, where sense and sensibility diverge).
Jonathan Weinberg wrote:
I'm away from home, and as a result not as well-organized as I'd
like to be. Near as I can tell, the following 24 WG members who have
posted to the list at least once[*] haven't submitted votes in the straw
poll: Dennis Jennings, Kilnam Chon, Daiva Tamulioniene, Eva Frolich,
Amadeu Abril i Abril, Ivan Pope, Werner Staub, Ross Wm. Rader, Javier
Sola, John Lewis, Tolga Yurderi, Petter Rindforth, Martin B. Schwimmer,
Craig Simon, Jeffrey Neuman, Onno Hovers, Keith Gymer, Jim Glanz, Rob
Hall, Raul Echeberria, Caroline Chicoine, Robert F. Connelly, Anthony
Lupo, Kathryn Kleiman.To the extent that any of you *have* voted (but I lost those files
en route to my mother-in-law's house), please let me know. For those of
you who haven't voted, I urge you please to do so now. You need only send
in an answer to Question One at this point. For your convenience, I'm
reprinting Question One below.QUESTION ONE: HOW MANY NEW gTLDS, AND HOW FAST?
Option 1: Without regard to whether it would be desirable to have many
gTLDs in the long term, ICANN should proceed now by adding only a few, and
then pausing for evaluation. Only after assessing the results should it
initiate any action to add more.Option 2: ICANN should implement a plan contemplating the authorization
of many new gTLDs over the next few years. (Example: ICANN might plan to
authorize up to 10-12 new registries, each operating 1-3 new gTLDs, each
year, for a period of five years; each year's authorizations would be
staggered over the course of the year.) This option would place the
burden on opponents, if evidence comes in demonstrating that additional
new gTLDs are a bad idea or that the rollout is too fast, to bring that
evidence to ICANN's attention and call for a halt or a slowdown.-------------------------------
[*] I figure that anybody who hasn't posted to the list even once has
probably decided that his or her energies are best expended elsewhere.Jon
Jonathan Weinberg
co-chair, WG-C
weinberg@msen.com