[ALAC] Something we didn't think about.

[Alan Greenberg]

For the record, it was sent for its interest, not because I thought 
it needed our formal attention.

Funny, curious, interesting are all words that come to mind.

Alan

At 21/08/2013 12:38 AM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
>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 
><<mailto:alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca>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