Re: [wg-c] "It Won't Work"

["Bret A. Fausett" <baf@fausett.com>]

The principles work by reference to the gTLDs already live compared against
the proposed new gTLDs. They work as general principles, providing general
guidance, but will not mechanistically produce the precise text strings to
be selected. They must be applied by people. One will be able to quibble
with the exact application, but one should also be able to use the
principles to prevent a gross misapplication. Gross misapplications should
be easy to spot.

Here are some examples.

The principles would suggest that the 6-10 new gTLDs should not be .biz,
.firm, .store, .shop, .buy, .sell, .commercial, and .com2. One, two, maybe
even three of those (which are all obviously commercial) might be okay
within the 6-10, but at some point, you come up against Principle (4) on
"Diversity." Exactly where in the spectrum you violate (4) is open to
debate, but at some point, you get there.

When we do this again, implementing 100, 1000, or more new gTLDs, then I
read the principles to be flexible enough to accommodate many more
commercial or mixed comm/noncomm TLDs. Diversity with a universe of 1000+ is
much different than within 6-10. With 100,000+ new gTLDs, the Diversity
concept completely falls away.

Similarly, Principle (3) suggests that none of the new gTLDs should be open,
generic TLDs with the strings .comm or .commercial, since there would be
little textual differentiation from .com.

Principle (3) should allow, however, a ".comm" that would be chartered, for
example, for the purpose of "commentary" on existing .com web sites. The
charter would be used to differentiate what the text string did not.

At some point, when the user population accepts the idea of new gTLDs and
understands that .com is different than .comm, then I read the rules as
flexible enough to accommodate .comm as an open, generic TLD.

I read the principles as general, flexible guidelines, which in the phased
implementation that this WG has proposed, should be valuable.
             -- Bret