[NA-Discuss] Pre-registrations

[ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net]

Danny, 

I do not know if the ALAC offered advice to the Board on the subject at
some prior point in time.

Similarly, I do not know if the ALAC has offered advice to the FTC or any
other agency of a political jurisdiction on the subject at some prior point
in time.

If so, then I suppose that the ALAC advice can be checked for currency and
either updated and referenced, or if current, simply referenced again.

Application projects like the 2004 Catalan project, or the 2000 Cooperatives
project, should engage in communications to their prospective communities,
as the default, the current situation, and still a problem for cooperatives,
is that no practical alternative exists to Verisign's for-profit "com" label.

How close pre-application communications offering pre-service information,
and of necessity, to meet the ICANN direct fee and additional costs which
are identified in the current DAG, also solliciting participation, whether
unconditional, or in exchange for some current value, or expectation, can
come to "pre-registration" of a hypothetical, I can't speculate upon.

The United Domains campaign is clearly not an instance of a single application
project, or a cooperating group such as ECLID (Scotland, Wales, Brittany,
Galacia, and the Autonomous Basque Region) communicating to their respective
communities.

I'm not optimistic concerning ICANN's current CEO instructing staff counsel
to make a determination that "pre-registration" volates the current registrar
contract, but I think offers of "pre-registration" by non-parties to registry
application projects are contrary to the public interest, and may harm the
targeted registry application projects, for which they have private redress.

Eric