[At-Large] New gTLDs

[Vittorio Bertola]

Bret Fausett ha scritto:
> I'd rather hear the plausible story that these these U.S.-based 
> companies (Verisign, Afilias, Neustar) plan on telling the governments 
> of China, Russia, Iran and so on as to why they get to run the IDN 
> versions of COMMERCIAL, INFORMATION and BUSINESS in the official 
> languages of their countries simply by virtue of having an ICANN 
> contract for .COM, .INFO and .BIZ. 

I agree with you, yet I think that it is a bit more complicated than 
this. "Commercial" is a broad concept, prone to local nuances and 
several semantic equivalents, so it is easy to see why you should have 
different competing incarnations of it, also in different languages. On 
the other hand, there is just one Catalonia, so I would expect .cat to 
point at the same registry whatever is the script in which it is 
expressed (as long as the translations represent Catalonia, rather than 
cats or caterpillars).

It looks to me that telling between categories of TLDs that have 
different types of meanings, and thus different features and 
requirements, might be a natural next step to manage the semantic 
expectations of the end user. However, categorizing in advance - even if 
you ensure room for new categories and unexpected ideas - also creates 
several disadvantages, so I am still not sure about where we should go. 
I understand that the objections process in the proposal is meant to 
give the flexibility to deal with this, but we should understand whether 
that works well in practice (e.g. both to allow national and other 
geopolitical entities control over their name's representations, and to 
prevent too broader protection such as Verisign preventing any new 
.com-like TLD).
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
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