[At-Large] X marks the spot - a small spot

[Karl Auerbach]

This is an interesting conversation ... but trademarks and branding 
ought not to be part of ICANN's job of assuring the technical stability, 
reliability, and accuracy of the top two tiers of the domain name system.

While staying within the bounds of technical stability, ICANN has done a 
great deal of good by dealing with things such as look-alike character 
sets and technical matters such as DNSSEC key signing.

But when ICANN stepped outside those bounds things have not gone so well 
for the every-day, non-corporate Internet user.

We have plenty of laws regarding contention among trademarks (and 
between others who use names and trademarks).  Indeed there are massive 
bodies of lawyers and others who toil and battle daily in those arenas.  
And we have similarly massive bodies of laws, backed by civil and 
criminal enforcement authorities, regarding misrepresentation, whether 
that is via a misleading advertisement or domain name.

But ICANN jumped in, nearly on day one, to become an international 
legislature and regulator, sans portfolio, over trademarks and domain 
names.  There was no more need for ICANN to do that than for ICANN to 
arbitrarily and baselessly legislate, as it did, that domain names can 
be held only in one year increments for a maximum of ten years.

I really annoyed a US Senator when I reminded him during a hearing (and 
while I was on the ICANN board) that if I got nine other directors to 
agree with me we could enact a policy that would amount to an 
international law of trademark that would supersede and trump anything 
that he, a mere United States Senator, could ever enact.

Whether Musk wants to destroy Twitter by changing it to x.com is Musk's 
business, not ICANN's.

There's plenty to discuss about ICANN, such as how it has become an 
institutionalized money pump into the pockets of certain practitioners 
of ossified and obsolete ICANN mandated business models, or about how 
there are entire ICANN designated industries that apply ICANN's 
pro-trademark policies against users of the net.

Ordinary Internet users have become paying losers in the game-o'ICANN, 
largely because of ICANN's obsession with trademarks and capture by the 
trademark protection industry (of which I am a member) who have found 
ICANN to be a convenient means to get what they often could not get in a 
court of law.

         --karl--