[ALAC] [At-Large] IGO names: is this worth war?

Alan Greenberg alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca
Wed Nov 2 06:06:29 UTC 2016


At 01/11/2016 12:26 PM, John R. Levine wrote:
>>While it is overkill to give a blanket ban on every IGO, I would rather
>>give protection to a handful of organizations that don't need it, in return
>>for protecting a number of organizations that would be critically impacted
>>if their names were not protected. I am speaking specifically regarding
>>organizations that do significant public fundraising in the public good --
>>the Red Cross (+ Red Crescent, etc), UNICEF, UNHCR, and others
>
>This should not be a difficult call.  The ALAC is supposed to 
>represent the interests of Internet users.  It would be bad if users 
>were confused by a TLD that looked like an international 
>organization but was in fact run by a domain speculator.  Users do 
>not care, and we on their behalf do not care, if a reserved name 
>interferes with some speculator's business plan.  In view of the 
>ongoing failure of the new gTLD round to attract meaningful interest 
>beyond speculators and criminals, any claim that yet more new TLDs 
>will benefit users is implausible.
>
>So if they have a list of reserved TLD names, reserve them 
>all.  From the point of view of the users, it is at worst harmless.

It is clear (to me anyway) that John is right and if it is a binary 
decision of supporting all acronyms or not, we support.

But ALAC also has a responsibility to monitor how ICANN works and try 
to make sure that our processes do not impede making good decisions. 
And in this case, we have a level of dysfuntion that may result in 
ICANN not being able to make the simple binary decision. And that 
dysfuntion is partly because the GAC has been over-reaching in what 
they are asking. My classic case is that according to their request, 
the acronym ISO has nothing to do with standards but rather the 
International Sugar Organization. The other problem is that at the 
moment, it is not a question of the ALAC supporting this decision to 
reserve IGO acronyms. It is a question how we GET to that point given 
that the GNSO is unlikely to recommend to the Board to do this.

Alan 




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