Re: ICANN approves .XXX red-light district for the Internet

[Eric Brunner-Williams <brunner () nic-naa net>]

On 3/21/11 1:19 PM, Stefan Fouant wrote:

> So the days of pointless TLDs are amongst us as we've now given would-be
> registrars the right to print money and companies are forced to purchase
> useless domain names in order to protect their trademarks, prevent
> squatting, etc.  When will sanity prevail?

First, not all registrars assume the credit-card risk model, or pursue 
the defensive registration, or ad word markets.

Second, the advocates for no necessity or utility requirement, or some 
form of public interest test for would-be applicants, is far, far 
larger than the 20 to 40 registrars engaged in that advocacy agenda.

An analysis that does not start with the legacy monopoly registry 
operator, and continue to the operators of "open" (now "standard") 
registries, is simply ill-informed or advocacy art, missing the 
Registry Stakeholders Group as a mostly unified[1] policy advocate.

An analysis that does not continue from these materially interested 
contracted parties and include domainers, and the ideologically 
committed parties, whether motivated by "free trade", or "thousand 
flowers", is also simply ill-informed or advocacy art, missing the Non 
Commercial Stakeholders Group as a policy advocate.

Third, an analysis that fails to observe that the Internet Service 
Providers Stakeholder Group has no policy agenda at ICANN is curious 
when offered in a network operator group. It might be reasonable when 
commenting on a recent development in the Law of the Sea (but see also 
bouys have bits), but slightly absurd when commenting on a recent 
development in the corporation acting as a registry of unique network 
identifiers, autonomous system numbers, and protocol parameters.

Finally, because pancakes are calling, the very complainants of 
squatting and defensive registration (the 1Q million-in-revenue every 
applicant for an "open", now "standard" registry places in its 
bizplan), the Intellectual Property Stakeholder Group is also an 
advocate for trademark TLDs, arguing that possession of $fee and a 
registry platform contract (there is now a niche industry of boutique 
".brand" operators-in-waiting) and a $bond establishes an absolute 
right to a label in the IANA root.

So, rather than memorizing the digits of Pi, for some later public 
recitation, one could start reciting brand names, for some later 
public recitation, for as long as there is a single unified root.

Have I managed to suggest that claims to sanity that are not exceeded 
by actual work are without foundation?

Eric

P.S. to Joel Jaeggli. You need to work harder. 20 bytes is less than 
sufficient to make any point usefully, and you missed .name/.pro, as 
well as the 2004 round .jobs/.travel as well as .asia/.tel, not as yet 
depurposed.

[1] Exception to the RySG "no public interest" advocacy are the few 
sponsored registries which were not covert open registries, and are 
not dependent upon open registry operators for registry services, viz. 
.cat, .coop, and .museum.