[At-Large] Thoughts on Delaying New gTLDs

[Evan Leibovitch]

Adam Peake wrote:
>> I think John was referring to most of the entries at 
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cym#Language_and_community
>
> And in dismissing them he's serious, or attempting to write a gag for 
> Saturday Night Live as the Ugly American? If serious then how sad, 
> small minded and dumb.

Personal insults have no place in this discussion and demean your own 
position.

> In Paris you might also have heard Amadeu talking about the impact of 
> .cat, massive increase in Catalan content.

I was there but was utterly unconvinced. Cause and effect were presented 
but the link between them extremely weak indeed, if it existed at all. 
There was absolutely no demonstration that the boom in Catalan content 
would not have happened without .cat.

>   Copied his comments below.  Dot cat at least seems to suggest less 
> ill advised than you thought.

Sorry, the comments indicate to me little except the expected chest 
thumping, even using sports metaphors such as "first division". (Hmm... 
If Catalan is now first division, what culture got relegated to make 
room for them?)

There is very weak if any proven causal link between the explosion of 
Catalan content and the creation of .cat -- one might have noticed that 
the volume of Internet content in *all* languages has mushroomed in the 
same timeframe.

I will grant that one important element was the reduction in "pirate" 
registrations which kept defensive registrations down. But one need not 
have a culturally based TLD in order to have sane regulations regarding 
squatting. And we certainly don't need hundreds of tiny TLDs, spending 
legitimate cultural enhancement funds of governments and NGOs just to 
repeatedly re-invent this wheel?

>> As an example, consider that the Welsh word for "Wales" is "Cymru 
>> (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/cymru/), yet "cymru.com" (despite its Welsh 
>> dragon logo) points to an American IT security form and "cymru.org" 
>> is unused but owned (according to WHOIS data) by someone in 
>> Switzerland. There may be a feeling that cultural identity is being 
>> hijacked, without the trademark protections offered to commercial 
>> interests or the reserved phrases requested by governments.
>
>
> Good you mention the BBC, creation of Welsh language television and 
> radio channels led to a resurgence in the use of the Welsh. What had 
> been a near dead language no longer is.

Dispensing with side discussions on the status of Welsh, it is telling 
that both you and I are using the BBC as an example of the growth of 
Welsh language content on the web. Hmm... what TLD are they using?

I personally believe that cultural groups are being sold a fraudulent 
bill of goods by ICANN and the TLD proponents. It is being alluded that 
a TLD is more than it is.  A TLD, the registry that maintains it and the 
registrars who sell its domains are not content creators or publishers. 
They're not television stations or film producers or bloggers. They're 
simply parts of a tool that provides the real creators with online 
names. Would any real potential content provider really say that they 
won't publish unless they can get their first choice of name?

Or maybe indeed, a TLD need be nothing more than a status symbol for 
sale, an expensive cultural icon offering negligible practical value but 
an Internet-based focus of emotion. If that is the case then I would 
argue that ICANN is exploiting cultural pride for financial and 
political gain.

>   No reason to think that . cym, .bzh might not have the same success 
> online.
I guess our standards of success are different.


> Go to the transcripts and listen to Amadeu's explanation of .cat - 
> small number of names, a lot of new content.
Cause and effect have not been proven.

> It's not our job to pre-judge business plans.
Sure it is, at very least because we don't want TLDs to go under and 
immediately shut out access to all the domains that were supposedly 
'empowered'. Financial stability is most certainly a component of TLD 
applications, is it not?

Then again, if ICANN is seen to be engaging in exploitation of cultural 
pride for its own financial enrichment, (by encouraging applications 
from groups that are known in advance to be  of questionable long-term 
stability) I don't consider that to be a very ethical approach.

> So people who want to develop Welsh language content will find a home 
> at the second level under the English word "nation".
How degrading! how horrible! How utterly humiliating!

Actually, the word "nation" uses the same spelling, and is used the same 
way, in English French and German. Of the three it was first used in 
French and I think it has its root in Latin. But I really don't care 
what the actual name is for this TLD -- I'm just as happy with any 
unused set of characters or even the single-letter TLD ".n". The point 
is to have *a* blanket cultural TLD, regardless of what it's called.

> But perhaps your right, find the cash and put in an application, but 
> don't write a business plan that limit the rights of others to innovate.
The right of registries to innovate is important to the registries, and 
they're welcome as a group to advocate for that (and they certainly do). 
But last I checked we were here in At-Large to advance the interest of 
the public, the registrants and end-users that would have to bear the 
biggest brunt of registry failure. In any conflicting interests between 
end-user and registry, in At-Large we have an obligation to be clearly 
on the side of the end-users.

In terms of promoting cultural production, TLDs serve no better function 
than good search engines, portals and resource sites. It is telling that 
in the new Google Chrome browser the same entry field is used for both 
domain names and search terms. The distinction has already blurred. The 
end-user depends upon domain names less each day as the way to find what 
they want on the Internet.

And anyone who thinks that a TLD is necessary to maintain life in their 
language/culture should be concerned with bigger problems.

- Evan