[ALAC] Something we didn't think about.

[Evan Leibovitch]

On 21 August 2013 12:06, Alan Greenberg <alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca> wrote:

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

My comments were related to:

*"Not really, that was a real WE. Plenty of opportunities for all of us to
> have caught this earlier..."*


I agree with Olivier that this was not the kind of thing that "we" needed
to be on the lookout for as the issue, in itself, has no main relevance to
At-Large.

Of course, with every day that goes by, some new unintended consequence
shows up. (or maybe some of these consequences were intended, but certainly
nasty in intent if so)


   - The wild and weird world of objection processes
   - "Priority roulette"
   - Prioritisation (and the aftermath of poor categorisation)
   - IDN variants
   - Applicant support (or rather, the general inaccessibility of the
   expansion in much of the world)
   - The tempest that is "Closed generics"
   - Compliance scaling
   - When is a community a real community? And who tells the difference
   - Confusion over string confusion
   - Making sense of the GAC's confused responses
   - The boondoggle about metrics
   - The aborted HSTLD effort

And surely there are more to come.

I really really would like to have ALAC advocate that, after IDNs,
dot-brands and a few of the first "open" gTLDs are launched. ICANN take a
breath and wait at least six months or so to see what happens before going
on with the others. While I still think the whole expansion was a colossal
mistake, it is not against the aims of ALAC to suggest slowing down the
release of TLDs to determine the public real-world consequences.

The word "delay" has been taken as a profanity within the ICANN bubble, but
I see no reason for ALAC to support an ongoing blind rush into the unknown.
There is NO end-user demand for hundreds of TLDs. And nobody can prove my
statement incorrect because no research has been done on the subject. We
can barely do a survey on the Applicant Support program, let alone on
global public demand for the whole gTLD expansion.

- Evan