[ALAC] Something we didn't think about.

[Evan Leibovitch]

I'm not overly concerned about this from an end users perspective.

This is a matter between warring parties within ICANN's commercial sectors
and IMO well beyond ALAC's sphere of concern. As soon as any application
for the string was judged to be non-confusing, what little interest
At-Large had in this matter vanished.

>From an end-users PoV on confusing strings, the domain name system is
already well-poisoned. ICANN has already been seen to be silent when
registrars deliberately use the confusion between .COM and .CO as a selling
point. (That CC names are beyond ICANN's ability to manage -- even when
being used as generics -- is a subtlety lost on the public.) And If nobody
cares about the confusion between .COM and .CO, then it's hard to get
suddenly concerned about confusion between .CAM and .COM (and also .CA or
.CAT, for that matter) and even harder to want to get involved in the
associated infighting.

The only product that I have extracted from this event is entertainment. I
find the variety in rulings (two applications for a string non-confusing,
but a third application for the exactly same string judged to be confusing)
to be highly amusing in its inconsistency. As Alan has said, the AGB rules
don't anticipate this, so a few more lawyers will be blessing ICANN's
existence to pay for their Range Rovers.

Certainly there are those who won't find this funny, But to someone like me
who believes the current gTLD expansion is a stupendous mistake, this event
is just Business as Usual. It's one more demonstration of the many
unintended consequences that such a botched effort was sure to produce.
Many have been revealed so far and there sill surely be more to come,
including some that will be far more severe than this. And given its scale,
its complexity, and the sheer greed that motivated much of it, anticipating
all consequences of the expansion was simply impossible.

IMO, one of ALAC's ongoing roles in this is to track and filter these
consequences, focused on minimizing harm from those after-effects that will
affect end-users. This is not one of them, from what I can tell.

- Evan



On 20 August 2013 12:57, Alan Greenberg <alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca> wrote:

> At 20/08/2013 11:53 AM, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:
>
>  On 20/08/2013 17:20, Alan Greenberg wrote:
>> > Hindsight says that we should have insisted that all string similarity
>> > objections be groups together, suing the sum-total of the arguments
>> > for and against. But in our collective wisdom, we didn't.
>> Substitute /we/ with /ICANN/
>>
>
> Not really, that was a real WE. Plenty of opportunities for all of us to
> have caught this earlier...
>
>
>
>  Also, nice Freudian slip of suing -> using.
>>
> Oops
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Evan Leibovitch
Toronto Canada

Em: evan at telly dot org
Sk: evanleibovitch
Tw: el56